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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




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■^ A LITTLE G*- 
ENGLISH GALLERY 



BY X 

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LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY 




191894 



NEW YORK 



HARPER AND BROTHERS 

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Copyright, 1894, by Harper & Brothers. 



All rights reserved. 



TO 
EDMUND GOSSE 

THIS FRIENDLY TRESPASS ON HIS FIELDS 



PREFATORY NOTE 

The studies in this book are chosen from a 
number written at irregular intervals, and from 
sheer interest in their subjects, long ago. Por- 
tions of them, or rough drafts of what has since 
been wholly remodelled from fresher and fuller 
material at first hand, have appeared within five 
years in The Atlantic Motithly, Macmillans, 
The Catholic World, and Poet-Lore; and thanks 
are due the magazines for permission to reprint 
them. Yet more cordial thanks, for kind as- 
sistance on biographical points, belong to the 
Earl of Powis; the Rev. R. H. Davies, Vicar 
of old St. Luke's, Chelsea ; the Rev. T. Vere 
Bayne, of Christchurch, and H. E. D. Blakis- 
ton, Esq., of Trinity College, Oxford ; T. W. 
Lyster, Esq. , of the National Library of Ire- 
land ; Aubrey de Vere Beauclerk, Esq. ; Miss 
Langton, of Langton-by-Spilsby; the Vicars of 
Dauntsey, Enfield Highway, and Montgomery, 
and especially those of High Ercall and Speke ; 
and the many others in England through whose 
courtesy and patience the tracer of these un- 
important sketches has been able to make them 
approximately life-like. 
1894 






M 



A 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. LADY DANVERS (1561-1627) ... I 

II. HENRY VAUGHAN (162I-1695) ... 53. 

III. GEORGE FARQUHAR (1677-I707) . . II9 

IV. TOPHAM BEAUCLERK (1739-I780) 

AND 

BENNET LANGTON (174I-1800) . . I7I 

V. WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830) , . 229 



I 

LADY DANVERS 

1561-1627 




LADY DANVERS 

R. MATTHEW ARNOLD 
somewhere devotes a grate- 
ful sentence to the women 
who have left a fragrance in 
literary history, and whose 
loss of long ago can yet inspire men of 
to-day with indescribable regret. Lady 
Danvers is surely one of these. As John 
Donne's dear friend, and George Her- 
bert's mother, she has a double poetic 
claim, like her unforgotten contempo- 
rary, Mary Sidney, for whom was made 
an everlasting epitaph. If Dr. Donne's 
fraternal fame have not quite the old lus- 
tre of the incomparable Sir Philip's, it 
is, at least, a greater honor to own Her- 
bert for son than to have perpetuated 
the race of Pembroke. Nor is it an in- 
harmonious thing to remember, in thus 
calling up, in order to rival it, the sweet 



memory of " Sidney's sister," that Her- 
bert and Pembroke have long been, and 
are yet, married names. 

Magdalen, the youngest child of Sir 
Richard Newport, and of Margaret 
Bromley, his wife, herself daughter of 
that Bromley who was Privy-Councillor, 
Lord Chief-Justice, and executor to Hen- 
ry Vni., was born in High Ercall, Salop; 
the loss or destruction of parish registers 
leaves us but 1561-62 as the probable 
date. Of princely stock, with three sis- 
ters and an only brother, and heir to virt- 
ue and affluence, she could look with the 
right pride of unfallen blood upon " the 
many fair coats the Newports bear " over 
their graves at Wroxeter. It was the day 
of learned and thoughtful girls ; and this 
girl seems to have been at home with 
book and pen, with lute and viol. She 
married, in the flower of her youth, Rich- 
ard Herbert, Esquire, of Blache Hall, 
Montgomery, black -haired and black- 
bearded, as were all his line ; a man of 
some intellectual training, and of noted 
courage, descended from a distinguished 
brother of the yet more distinguished Sir 



Richard Herbert of Edward IV. 's time, 
and from the most ancient rank of Wales 
and England. At Eyton in Salop, in 
1 581, was born their eldest child, Ed- 
ward, afterwards Lord Herbert of Cher- 
bury, a writer who is still the puzzle and 
delight of Continental critics. He is said 
to have been a beautiful boy, and not 
very robust ; his first speculation with 
his infant tongue was the piercing query : 
" How came I into this world .^" But his 
next brother, Richard, was of another 
stamp ; and went his frank, flashing, fight- 
ing way through Europe, "with scars of 
four-and-twenty wounds upon him, to his 
grave " at Bergen-op-Zoom, with William^ 
the third son, following in his soldierly 
footsteps. Charles grew up reserved and 
studious, and died, like his paternal uncle, 
a dutiful Fellow of New College, Oxford. 
The fifth of these Herberts, " a soul com- 
posed of harmonies," as Cotton said of 
him, and destined to make the name be- 
loved among all readers of English, was 
George, the poet, the saintly ** parson of 
Fuggleston and Bemerton." Henry, his 
junior, with whom George had a sympathy 



peculiarly warm and long, became in his 
manhood Master of the Revels, and held 
the office for over fifty years. ** You and I 
are alone left to brother it," Lord Herbert 
of Cherbury once wrote him, in a mood 
more tender than his wont, when all else 
of that radiant family had gone into dust. 
The youngest of Magdalen Newport's sons 
was Thomas, ** a posthumous," traveller, 
sailor, and master of a ship in the war 
against Algiers. Elizabeth, Margaret, and 
Frances were the daughters, of whom 
Izaak Walton says, with satisfaction, that 
they lived to be examples of virtue, and 
to do good to their generation. None of 
them made an illustrious match. Mar- 
garet married a Vaughan. Frances se- 
cured unto herself the patronymic Brown, 
and was happily seconded by Elizabeth, 
George Herbert's "dear sick sister," who 
became Mistress Jones. In the south 
chancel transept of Montgomery Church, 
where Richard Herbert the elder had 
been buried three years before, there was 
erected in 1600, at his wife's cost, a large 
canopied alabaster altar -tomb, with two 
portrait - figures recumbent. All around 



it, in the quaint and affectionate boast of 
the age, are the small images of these 
seven sons and three daughters; ** Job's 
number and Job's distribution," as she 
once remarked, and as her biographers 
failed not to repeat after her. But their 
kindred ashes are widely sundered, and 
*' as content with six foot as with the 
moles of Adrianus." This at Montgom- 
ery is the only known representation of 
the Lady Magdalen. Her ef!igy lies at 
her husband's left, the palms folded, the 
eyes open, the full hair rolled back from 
a low brow, beneath a charming and sim- 
ple head-dress. Nothing can be nobler 
than the whole look of the face, like her 
in her prime, and reminding one of her 
son's loving epithet, "my Juno." The 
short-sighted inscription upon the slab 
yet includes her name. 

Never had an army of brilliant and re- 
quiring children a more excellent mother. 
" Sever a parents,'' her gentle George called 
her in his scholarly verses; and such she 
was, with the mingled sagacity and joy- 
ousness which made up her character. 
If we are to believe their own testimony, 



the leading members of her young family- 
were of excessively peppery Cymric tem- 
peraments, and worthy to call out that 
"manlier part " of her which Dr. Donne, 
who had every opportunity of observing 
it in play, was so quick to praise. There 
is a passage in a letter of Sir Thom- 
as Lacy, addressed to Edward Herbert, 
•touching upon "the knowledge I had 
how ill you can digest the least indignity." 
" Holy George Herbert " himself, in 1618, 
commended to his dear brother Henry 
the gospel of self - honoring : "It is the 
part of a poor spirit to undervalue him- 
self and blush." And physical courage 
went hand in hand with this blameless 
haughtiness of the Herberts, a pretty col- 
lateral proof of which may be adduced 
from a message of Sir Henry Jones to his 
brother-in-law, the other Henry just 
mentioned, concerning a gift for his little 
nephew. " If my cozen, William Herbert 
your Sonne ... be ready for the rideing of 
a horse, I will provide him with a Welch 
nagg that shall be as mettlesome as him- 
self." There is no doubt that all this 
racial fire was fostered by one woman. 



" Thou my root, and my most firm rock, 
O my mother !" George cried, long after 
in the Parentalia, aware that he owed to 
her his high ideals, and the strength of 
character which is born of self-discipline. 
** God gave her," says one of her two 
devoted annalists, who we wish were 
not so brief and meagre of detail — ** God 
gave her such a comeliness as though she 
was not proud of it, yet she was so con- 
tent with it as not to go about to mend 
it by any art." Her fortune was large, 
her benevolence wide-spreading. All the 
countryside knew her for the living rep- 
resentative of the ever-hospitable houses 
of Newport and Bromley. ** She gave not 
on some great days," continues Dr. Donne, 
"or at solemn goings abroad; but as 
God's true almoners, the sun and moon, 
that pass on in a continual doing of good ; 
as she received her daily bread from God, 
so daily she distributed it, and imparted 
it to others." In these years of her wife- 
hood and widowhood at Montgomery 
Castle (the " romancy place " dating from 
the eleventh century, and ruined, like the 
fine old house at High Ercall, during the 



Civil Wars), and afterwards at Oxford and 
London, she reared her happy crew of 
boys and girls in an air of generosity 
and honor; training them to habits of 
hardiness and simplicity, and to the equal 
relish of work and play. " Herself with 
her whole family (as a church in that 
elect lady's house, to whom John wrote 
his second Epistle) did every Sabbath 
shut up the day at night with a gener- 
al, with a cheerful singing of psalms." 
One may guess at young Richard's tur- 
moil in-doors, and at the little Elizabeth's 
soft, patient ways, and think of George 
(on Sundays at any rate) as the child of 
content, " the contesseration of elegan- 
ces " worthy Archdeacon Oley called 
him. 

The fair and stately matron moving 
over them and am.ong them was not 
w^ithout her prejudices. ** I was once," 
Edward testifies, " in danger of drown- 
ing, learning to swim. My mother, upon 
her blessing, charged me never to learn 
swimming; telling me, further, that she 
had learned of more drowned than saved 
by it." Though the given reason failed 



to impress him, he adds, the command- 
ment did ; so that the accomplished 
Crichton of Cherbury, who understood 
alchemy, broke his way through meta- 
physics, and rode the Great Horse ; the 
ambassador, author, and beau, to whom 
Ben Jonson sent his greeting: 

** What man art thou that art so many men, 
All-virtuous Herbert?" 

even he lacked, on principle, the science 
of keeping himself alive in an alien ele- 
ment, because it had been pronounced 
less risky to die outright ! It was a pret- 
ty paradox, and one which sets down our 
high-minded Magdalen as quite feminine, 
quite human. 

Her Edward was matriculated in 1595 
at University College, Oxford,* for which 
he seemed to retain no great partiality ; 
he bequeathed his books, like a loyal 
Welshman, to Jesus College, instead, and 

* Walton confuses this Edward Herbert with a name- 
sake entered at Queen's College ; and he follows the 
erring dates of the Autobiography of Lord Herbert of 
Cherbury. The boy's age is correctly given as fourteen 
in the college registers. 



his manuscripts to the Bodleian Library. 
In 1598, when he was little more than 
seventeen, he was wedded to his cousin 
Mary Herbert, of St. Gillian in Mon- 
mouthshire. Her age was one-and-twen- 
ty; she was an heiress, enjoined by her 
father's will to marry a Herbert or for- 
feit her estates; she was also almost a 
philosopher. There was no wild affec- 
tion on either side, but the marriage 
promised rather well, both persons hav- 
ing resources ; and no real catastrophe 
befell either in after-life. Much as she 
desired the match for worldly motives, 
the chief promoter of it was too solici- 
tous for her tall dreamer of a son, who 
underwent the pleasing peril of having 
Queen Bess clap him on the cheek, not 
to take the whole weight of conjugal 
direction on her own shoulders. With- 
out undue officiousness, but with the mas- 
terly foresight of a shrewd saint, she 
moved to Oxford from ^iIontgomery with 
her younger children and their tutors, in 
order to handle Mistress Herbert's hus- 
band during his minority. ** She con- 
tinued there with him," says Walton, in 



13 



his Life of George Herbert, ** and still 
kept him in a moderate awe of herself, 
and so much under her own eye as to 
see and converse with him daily ; but she 
managed this power over him without 
any such rigid sourness as might make 
her company a torment to her child, but 
with such a sweetness and compliance 
with the recreations and pleasures of 
youth as did incline him willingly to 
spend much of his time in the company 
of his dear and careful mother." 

It was during this stay that she con- 
tracted the chivalrous friendship which 
has embalmed her tranquil memory. Dr. 
John Donne (not ordained until 1614, and 
indeed not Dr. Donne then at all, but 
** Jack Donne," his profaner self) had been 
at Cadiz with Essex, and had wandered 
over the face of Europe ; and he came 
back, accidentally, to Oxford during the 
most troubled year of his early prime. It 
was no strange place to him,* who had 

* Donne had been in residence at both Universities, 
but took no degree at either, as he had scruples against 
accepting the conditions imposed. He was at that time, 
and until about 1593, like his parents, a Catholic. His 



been, at eleven, the Pico della Mirandola 
of Hart Hall, and whose relatives seem 
to have resided always in the town. 
There and then, however, he cast his 
bright eye upon Excellence, and in his 
own phrase, 

" — dared love that, and say so, too, 
And forget the He and She." 

We can do no better than cite a cele- 
brated and beautiful passage, once more 
from Walton : *' This amity, begun at this 
time and place, was not an amity that 
polluted their souls, but an amity made 
up of a chain of suitable inclinations and 
virtues; an amity like that of St. Chrys- 
ostom to his dear and virtuous Olympias, 
whom, in his letters, he calls his saint ; or 
an amity, indeed, more like that of St. 
Hierom to his Paula, whose affection to 
her was such that he turned poet in his 
old age, and then made her epitaph, wish- 
ing all his body were turned into tongues 
that he might declare her just praises to 



father was of Welsh descent : a fact which may have 
borne its share in attracting him towards the Herberts. 



posterity." How these words remind 
one of the sweet historic mention which 
Condivi gives to the relations between 
Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo ! The 
little English idyl of friendship and the 
great Italian one run parallel in much. 

Donne's trenchant Satires, some of the 
earliest and very best in the language, 
were already written, and he was not with- 
out the hint of fame. Born in 1573, he 
was but eight years the senior of Edward 
Herbert, and not more than a dozen years 
the junior of Edward Herbert's mother. 
To her two sons, also, who were to figure 
as men of letters, he was sincerely at- 
tached from the first, and had a marked 
and lasting influence on their minds. 
Donne had the superabundance of men- 
tal power which Mr. Minto has pointed 
out as the paradoxical cause of his failure 
to become a great poet. He was a three- 
storied soul, as the French say: a spirit 
of many sides and moods, a life-long dream- 
er of good and bad dreams. To his rest- 
less, incisive intelligence his contempo- 
raries, with Jonson and Carew at their 
head, bowed in hyperboles of acclaim. 



i6 



He had a changeful conscience, often 
antagonized and often appeased. There 
was a strain in him of strong joy, for he 
was descended through his mother from 
pleasant John Heywood the dramatist, 
and from the father of that great and 
merry - hearted gentleman, Sir Thomas 
More. If ever man needed vitality to 
buoy him over sorrows heavy and vast, 
it was Donne in his ''yeasting youth." 
Thrown, through no fault but his own, 
from his old footholds of religion and 
occupation, and unable, despite his versa- 
tile and alert genius, to grind a steady 
living from the hard mills of the world, 
he was in the midst of a bitter plight 
when the friends worthy of him found a 
heavenly opportunity which they did not 
let go by, and made his acceptance of 
their favor a rich gift unto themselves. 
Foremost among these, besides Lady 
Herbert, were Sir Robert Drury of Drury 
Lane, and a kinsman. Sir Francis Woolly, 
of Pirford, Surrey, fated to die in his youth, 
both of whom gave the Donnes, for some 
nine consecutive years, the use of their 
princely houses. John Donne had been in 



I? 

the service of the Chancellor, Lord Elles- 
mere, and lost place and purse by the op- 
position to his marriage with his " lectissi- 
ma dilectissiinaquey Anne More, who was 
Lady Ellesmere's niece, the daughter of Sir 
George More of Loxly, Lieutenant of the 
Tower, and probably a distant cousin of 
his own. No reverses, however, could beat 
the pathetic cheer out of him. " Anne 
Donne,* undone," was one of his inveter- 
ate teary jests over the state of things 
at home. He wrote once, with sickness, 
poverty, and despair at his elbow : *' If 
God should ease us with burials, I know 
not how to perform even that. But I 
flatter myself that I am dying, too, for I 
cannot waste faster than by such griefs." 
Five of his twelve children passed before 
their father to the grave, the good do- 
mestic daughter Constance upholding 
him always, and keeping the house to- 
gether. But just as hope dawned with 
his appointment to the Lectureship of 
Lincoln's Inn, heavenward suddenly, with 
her youngest-born, in 1617, went his dear 

* Anne Donne, it may be remarked, was also the 
name of Cowper's mother. 

2 



i8 



and faithful wife, whom he laid to rest in 
St. Clement Danes. 

About the time when the remorseful old 
queen died disdainfully on her chamber- 
floor at Richmond, the necessities of this 
family called for daily succors, and with 
a simple and noble delicacy they were 
supplied. Nor did they cease. Magda- 
len Herbert was a '' bountiful benefactor," 
Donne ** as grateful an acknowledger." 
His first letter to her from Mitcham in 
Surrey, dated July lo, 1607, is made up of 
terse, tender thanks, in his heart's own 
odd language. He sends her an enclosure 
of sonnets and hymns, "lost to us," says 
Walton, movingly, ** but doubtless they 
were such as they two now sing in 
heaven." Dr. Grosart, with a great show 
of justice, claims that the sequence called 
La Corona, and familiar to latter-day read- 
ers, are the identical sonnets passed from 
one to the other. During this same month 
of July we know that, paying a call in his 
" London, plaguey London," and finding 
his friend abroad,* Dr. Donne consoled 

* Sir Richard Baker's Chronicle^ 1684, mentions Dr. 



19 



himself by leaving a courtliest message : 
" Your memory is a state-cloth and pres- 
ence which I reverence, though you be 
away ;" and went back after to his " sal- 
lads and onions" at Mitcham, or to his 
solitary lodgings near Whitehall. 

The attachment, close and deferent 
on both sides, was continued without a 
breach, and with the intention, at least, 
of " almost daily letters." Thoreau, quot- 
ing Chaucer, so saluted Mrs. Emerson: 
** You have helped to keep my life on 
loft." No meaner service than this was 
his dear lady's to John Donne, often here- 
tofore astray in the slough of doubt and 
dissipation ; she fed more than his little 
children, clothed more than his body, and 
fostered anew in him that faith in hu- 
manity which is the well-spring of good 
works. He was not a poet of Leigh 
Hunt's innocent temperament, who could 
accept benefits gladly and gracefully from 
any appreciator ; his soul dwelt too re- 
mote and proud in her accustomed cita- 
dels. But this loving help, thrust upon 

Donne as one of his " heroic Grecians," and adds, in 
the same breath, that he was " a great visitor of ladies.'* 



him, he took with dignity, and after 1621, 
when he was able, in his own person, to 
befriend others, he gave back gallantly 
to mankind the blessings he once re- 
ceived from two or three. It was some- 
thing for Magdalen Herbert to have saved 
a master -name to English letters, and 
kept in his unique place the poet, inter- 
esting beyond many, whose fantastic but 
real force swayed generations of think- 
ing and singing men ; it was something, 
also, to have won in return the words 
which were his gold coin of payment. 
Nowhere is Donne's sentiment more gen- 
uine, his workmanship more happy and 
less complex, than in the verses dedicated 
to her blameless name. They have a lucid- 
ity unsurpassed among the yet straight- 
forward lyrics of their day. Drayton's self, 
who died in the same year with Donne, 
might have addressed to the lady of Eyton 
so much of his noble extravagance ; 

"Queens hereafter shall be glad to live 
Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise." 

Yet in these eulogies, as in most of the 
graver contemporaneous poems of the 



sort, there is little personality to be de- 
tected ; the homage has rather a floating 
outline, an unapproaching music, exqui- 
site and awed. Donne gives, sometimes, 
the large Elizabethan measure : 

** Is there any good which is not she?" 

In the so-called Elegy, The Aitticrnnal, 
written on leaving Oxford, he starts off 
with a well-known cherishable strophe : 

"No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace 
As I have seen in one autumnal face." 

The entire poem is a monody on the en- 
croachments of years, and neatly chrono- 
logical : 

"If we love things long-sought, age is a thing 
Which we are fifty years in compassing; 
If transitory things, which soon decay, 
Age must be loveliest at the latest day." 

It Strikes the modern ear as maladroit 
enough that a woman in her yet sunshiny 
forties, and a most comely woman to 
boot, should have required prosody's in- 
genious excuses for wrinkles and kindred 
damages. Was life so hard as that in 
** the spacious days " ? Shakespeare, in 



agreement with Horace, had already re- 
minded his handsome '* Will " of the piti- 
less and too expeditious hour, 

" When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, 
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field!" 

which also seems, to a nice historical 
sense, somewhat staggering. The close 
of Donne's little homily is perfect, and full 
of the winning melancholy which was 
part of his birthright in art, whenever he 
allowed himself direct and homely ex- 
pression : 

" May still 
My love descend! and journey down the hill, 
Not panting after growing beauties ; so 
I shall ebb on with them who homeward go,'* 

Such was John Donne's first known trib- 
ute to his friend. She must have been 
early and thoroughly familiar with his 
manuscripts, which were passed about 
freely, Dr. Grosart thinks, prior to 1613, 
and which burned what Massinger would 
call " no adulterate incense " to herself. 
Her bays are to be gleaned ofT many a 
tree, and she must have cast a frequent 
influence on Donne's work, which is not 



23 

traceable now. He seems to have had 
a Crashaw-Hke devotion to the Christian 
saint whose inheritance 

" Bethina was, and jointure Magdalo," 

not unconnected with the fact that some 
one else was Magdalen also ; never does 
he tire of dwelling on the coincidence 
and the difiference. In one of his quaint- 
ly moralizing songs, he goes seeking a 
"true-love" primrose, where but on 
Montgomery Hill! for he is hers, by all 
chivalrous tokens, as much as he may be. 
Again he cites, and almost with humor : 

" that perplexing eye 
Which equally claims love and reverence." 

And his platonics make their honorable 
challenge at the end of some fine lines : 

" So much do I love her choice, that I 
Would fain love him that shall be loved of her!" 

There was prescience in that couplet. As 
early, at least, as 1607-8, the widow's long 
privacy ended, probably while she was at 
her •' howse at Charing Cross," watching 
over the progress of her son George at 



24 



Westminster School ; and he that was 
" loved of her " was the grandson of the 
last Lord Latimer of the Nevilles, junior 
brother of a nobleman who perished with 
Essex in 1602, and brother and heir of 
that Sir Henry Danvers who was created 
Earl of Danby in 1625 for his services in 
Ireland, and who literally left a green 
memory as the founder of the pleasant 
Physic Gardens at Oxford. The name 
of Danvers, the kindly step-father, is one 
of the noteworthy omissions of Lord Her- 
bert of Cherbury's Autobiography. But 
George Herbert was devoted to him, as 
his many letters show, and turned to 
him, never in vain, during his restless 
years at Cambridge ; and into his circle 
of relatives, with romantic suddenness, 
he afterwards married. Sir John Dan- 
vers, of Dauntsey, Wilts, was twenty years 
younger than his wife. It is worth while 
to quote the very deft and courtly state- 
ment of the case made at the last by Dr. 
Donne : " The natural endowments of 
her person were such as had their part 
in drawing and fixing the affections of 
such a person as by his birth and youth 



and interest in great favors at court, and 
legal proximity to great possessions in 
the world, might justly have promised 
him acceptance in what family soever, 
or upon what person soever, he had di- 
rected. . . . He placed them here, neither 
diverted thence, nor repented since. For 
as the well -tuning of an instrument 
makes higher and lower strings of one 
sound, so the inequality of their years 
was thus reduced to an evenness, that 
she had a cheerfulness agreeable to his 
youth, and he had a sober staidness con- 
formable to her more advanced years. 
So that I would not consider her at so 
much more than forty, nor him at so 
much less than thirty, at that time ; but 
as their persons were made one and their 
fortunes made one by marriage, so I 
would put their years into one number, 
and finding a sixty between them, think 
them thirty apiece; for as twins of one 
hour they lived."* 

* Dr. Donne's conceit about the ages of his friends is 
better handled in the young Cartwright's 

" Chloe, why wish you that your years," 
a little later. It is not impossible that Cartwright, an 



26 



In the August of 1607, a masque by- 
John Marston was given in the now ru- 
ined castle of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, eigh- 
teen miles from Leicester, as an enter- 
tainment devised by Lord Huntingdon 
and his young wife, the Lady EHzabeth 
Stanley, to welcome her mother, Alice, 
Countess -Dowager of Derby,* "the first 
night of her honor's arrival at the house 
of Ashby." Fourteen noble ladies took 
part in the masque, and among them was 
'* Mris Da'vers." The name may, perhaps, 
be recognized as that of the subject of 
this sketch, for Sir John Danvers was not 
knighted until the following year; and 
it has been so recognized by interested 

Oxonian and an observer, may have drawn upon Donne's 
report of this very wedding for his charming and ingen- 
ious lyric. 

* This august personage was one of the Spencers of 
Althorp. At this time she had been for six years the 
wife of her second husband, the Lord Keeper Egerton, 
although retaining the magnificent title of her widow- 
hood. At their estate of Harefield in Middlesex, Milton's 
Arcades was afterwards given, and it will be remembered 
what fine compliments to the then aged countess-dowa- 
ger figure in its opening verses. Spenser's Teares of the 
Muses had been dedicated to her, in her prime, and she 
was the Amaryllis " highest in degree " of his Colin 
Clout'' s Come Home Again. 



27 



scholars who have searched Nichols's 
Progresses of James I. And yet we can- 
not be too sure that we have her before 
us, in the wreaths and picturesque dra- 
peries of the amateur stage ; for there 
was another Mistress Da'vers at court, 
whose purported letter, dated February 
3, 1613, signed with her confusing Chris- 
tian names of " Mary Magdaline," gave 
great trouble, thirty years ago, to the ex- 
perts of the Camden Society. Besides, 
a letter of the good gossipy Chamberlain, 
dated March 3, 1608-9, mentions as if it 
were then a piece of fresh news : " Young 
Davers is likewise wedded to the widow 
Herbert, Sir Edward's mother, of more 
than twice his age." This would seem 
to preclude the possibility of the fair 
masquer being the same person. 

The mother of many Herberts, the 
*' more than forty " bride, was by nature 
a home-keeping character. Among the 
correspondence relating to Lord Herbert 
of Cherbury, privately printed in 1886 by 
the Earl of Powis, are a few pages which 
give us invaluable glimpses of the Lon- 
don household. Lady Danvers's eldest 



28 



son, who set off upon his travels soon 
after her second marriage, and who applied 
himself vigorously to the various diver- 
sions of body and mind catalogued in 
the Autobiography, found himself often 
pinched for money. In such a strait, not 
unfamiliar to other fine gentlemen of his 
day, he invariably appealed to the servi- 
ces of the step-father who was his junior, 
in England. The latter, writing how 
" wee are all some what after the olde 
manner, and doe hartely wish you well," 
seems to have busied himself to some 
avail, in concert with his brother-in-law. 
Sir Francis Newport (the first Lord 
Newport), in securing letters of credit to 
Milan, Turin, the Netherlands, and else- 
where, and in explaining at length, in his 
long involved sentences, how matters 
could be bettered. Whether or not the 
absent Knight of the Bath had reason 
to suspect Sir John's disinterested action 
when it came to the handling of pounds 
and pence, he does not seem, then or 
after, to have burdened him with any 
great harvest of thanks. But Sir John's 
faithful wife knew how to defend him, in 



29 



a script of May 12, 161 5, which may be 
quoted precisely as it stands in the Her- 
bert papers. 

"To my best beloved sonn, S'r Edward Her- 
bert, Knight, 
'* My deare Sonn, 

it is straunge to me to here 
you to complayne of want of care of you in 
your absence when my thoughts are seldom re- 
moved from you w^hich must assuredly set me 
aworkinge of any thinge may doe you good, & 
for writinge the one of us yf not both never 
let messenges pass without letter, your stay 
abroad is so short in any one place & we so 
unhappy in givinge you contentment as our let- 
ters com not to your hands which we are sorry 
for. And to tel you further of S'r John Da'- 
vers Love which I dare sweare is to no man 
more, he is & hath beene so careful to keep 
you from lake of money now you are abroad as 
your Bay life faylinge payment as they continu- 
ally doe & pay no man, he goeth to your Mer- 
chaunt, offers him self & all the powers he 
can make to supply you as your occasions may 
require, mistake him not, but beleeve me there 
was never a tenderer hart or a lovinger minde 
in any man then is in him towards you who 
have power to com'aund him & all that is his. 



30 



Now for your Baylifs I must tell you they have 
not yet payed your brothers all their Anuities 
due at Midsom'er past & but half due at 
Christmas last and no news of the rest, this yf 
advauntage were taken might be preiuditiall to 
you and it is ill for your Brothers & very ill 
you have such officers. 

'* I hope it will bringe you home & that is 
all the good can com of this. your sister 
Johnes hath long beene sicke & within this 
8 dayes hath brought a boy she is so weake as 
she is much feared by those aboute her. my 
Lady Vachell lyes now adyeinge the bell hath 
twice gone for her. your wife & sweet chil- 
dren are well & herein I send you little Flor- 
ence letter to see w^hat comfort you may have 
of your deare children, let them, my Dear 
sonn, draw you home & affoorde them your 
care and me your comfort that desire more to 
see you then I desire any thinge ells in the 
world, and now I end with my dayly prayer 
for your health and safe retorne to Your ever 
lovinge mother, Magd : Da'vers. 

*'I have received the Pattent of your Br: 
William, & S'r John hath beene with the am- 
bassatore who stayes for S'r James Sandaline * 
his cominge." 

* Sir James Sandelyn, Sandalo, or Sandilands (who 



3 = 



A sympathizing reader, aware of se- 
quences, may wonder whence Sir John 
drew ** all the powers he can make " ! The 
dignified letter, with its undulating syn- 
tax and thrifty punctuation, harmonizes 
with all we know of this delightful wom- 
an, who could so reproach what she 
deemed a shortcoming, without a touch 
of temper. How affectionate is the ref- 
erence to the "little Florence " who died 
young, and to the other children, suffi- 
ciently precious to all that household, ex- 
cept to the wool-gathering chevalier their 
father, far away! Their innocent faces 
peer again through a sweet postscript of 
their grand -uncle: ("Dick is here, Ned 
and Bettye at Haughmond,") written in 
the winter, from Eyton, to the truant at 



cuts his finest figure as Jacobus Sandilandius in The 
Muses' Welcome) was appointed Maistre d' Hostel to the 
beloved and beautiful Princess Elizabeth on her marriage 
to Frederic, Count Palatine of the Rhine, afterwards 
King of Bohemia, in 1612. As Sir James's name is down 
on the lists of the Exchequer for a gift in 161 5, and as his 
little son Richard was baptized in Deptford Church two 
months after the date of Lady Danvers's letter, we may 
conclude that he came back to England just when the 
** ambassatore " expected him. 



32 



the Hague.* This same genial Sir Fran- 
cis Newport, " imoderately desyring to 
see you," confides to his nephew, during 
what he complains of as "a verye drye 
and hott time"t for Shropshire farmers, 
that ** mye syster your mother is confi- 
dent to take a iourney into these pts this 
somer, the rather, I think, because yo'r 
brother Vaugh'n is dead & if yo' have 
a willing harte you ma3^e come tyme 
enough to acco'pany her heare, & would 
not then the companye bee much the 
better ?" But we fear the little excursion 
never came off. Edward Herbert's next 
visit to his home, presumably after a four- 
years' absence, was in 1619; and in May 
of that year he accepted the office of 
Ambassador to France, and spread his 

* Edward Herbert served as a volunteer in the cam- 
paign of 1614-15 in the Netherlands, under the Prince of 
Orange. Richard Herbert, here mentioned, was his eld- 
est son, a future Cavalier and captain of a troop of horse 
in the Civil Wars ; Edward was the baby, and " Bettye " 
the child Beatrice, destined, like her sister, to a short 
life. 

t This 1614-15 was an eccentric and un-English year 
throughout. The winter signalized itself by the Great 
Snow; ^'frigus intensum,''^ as Camden says, '^ ei nix 
copiosissim.a.'''' 



33 



ready wing again to the Continent. And 
the At hence Oxoniensis will not let us for- 
get that the too spirited envoy had to be 
temporarily recalled in 162 1, because he 
had ** irreverently treated " De Luynes, 
the powerful but good-for-nothing Con- 
stable of France. It is not insignificant 
that this was the year in which George 
Herbert wrote to his mother in one of his 
consoling moods, bidding her be of good 
cheer, albeit her health and wealth were 
gone, and the conduct of her children 
was not very satisfying ! 

We know that Lady Danvers had the 
** honor, love, obedience, troops of friends " 
which became her, and that she lost none 
of her influence, none of her serene charm. 
Her poet was much with her in his ad- 
vancing age. In July, 1625, while the 
plague was raging in London, Donne re- 
minded Sir Henry Wotton of the leisure 
he enjoyed, golden as Cicero's, by dating 
his letter '* from S'r John Davor's house 
at Chelsey, of w'ich house & my Lord 
Carlil's at Hanworth I make up my Tus- 
culum." Many a peaceful evening must 
they have passed upon the terraces, with- 
3 



34 



in sound of the solemn songs always dear 
to both. Visitors yet more illustrious 
came there from the city ; for the noble 
hostess had once the privilege of reviv- 
ing the great Lord Bacon,* who had faint- 
ed in her garden. We learn, with sym- 
pathy, that *' sickness, in the declination 
of her years, had opened her to an over- 
flowing of melancholy ; not that she ever 
lay under that water, but yet had, some- 
times, some high tides of it." Death 
chose Dr. Donne's ministering angel be- 
fore him, after thirty years of mutual 
fealty. Her restless son Edward, now at 
home, was already eminent, and wearmg 
his little Irish title of Baron Castleisland; 
her thoughtful Charles was long dead ; 
her brother, also, was no more ; her 
daughters were matrons, and dwelling in 
prosperity. With but one unfulfilled wish, 
that of seeing her favorite George mar- 
ried and in holy orders,t and after a life 

* Lord Bacon dedicated to Edward Herbert, "the fa- 
ther of English deists," his very flat translation of the 
Psalms ! George wrote three Latin poems in his honor, 
one being upon the occasion of his death. 

t He was, in July of 1626, ordained deacon, and preb- 



35 



which left a wake of sunshine behind 
it in the world, very patiently and hope- 
fully Magdalen Newport, Lady Danvers, 
entered upon eternity, in the early June of 
1627. On the eighth day of the month, 
in St. Luke's, the parish church of Chel- 
sea, she was buried : 

" Old age with snow-bright hair, and folded palm,'* 

the final earthly glimpse of her still 
traditionally beautiful. On the first of 
July her faithful liegeman, now Dean of 
St. Paul's and Vicar of St. Dunstan-in-the- 
West, preached her funeral sermon there, 
before a crowd of the great ones of Lon- 
don, the clergy, and the poor. Izaak 
Walton's kind face looked up from a near 
pew, whence he saw Dr. Donne's tears, 
and felt his breaking voice, the voice of 
one who did not belie his friend, nigh the 
end of his own pilgrimage. In present 
grief and among graver memories, he had 
the true perception not to forget how 
joyous she had been. *' She died," he said, 

endary of Layton Ecclesia in Huntingdonshire. Read- 
ers of Walton will remember how his dear mother invit- 
ed him to commit simony on that occasion. 



36 



** without any change of countenance or 
posture, without any struggHng, any disor- 
der, . . . and expected that which she hath 
received : God's physic and God's music, 
a Christianly death. . . . She was eyes to 
the bhnd, and feet to the lame, . . . natu- 
rally cheerful and merry, and loving face- 
tiousness and sharpness of wit." His 
own fund of mirth and strength was fast 
going ; and a haunting line of hi-s youth, 

"And all my pleasures are like yesterday," 

must have reverted to him many and 
many a time. Morbid and persistent 
thoughts beset him from this hour, prob- 
ably, more than ever, until he had the ef- 
figy of himself, painted as he was, laid in 
his failing sight ;* morbid and persistent 
thoughts of the ruin which befalls the 
bright bodies of humanity, sometimes 

* The standing marble figure in a winding-sheet which 
Dr. King had modelled upon this strange painting on wood, 
may yet be seen in the south ambulatory of the choir of 
St. Paul's ; almost the only relic saved from the old cathe- 
dral which perished in the Great Fire of 1666. It is not 
only of unique interest, but of considerable artistic beauty, 
and " seems to breathe faintly," as Sir Henry Wotton said 
ofit. 



37 



surging up in his loneliness, and crowd- 
ing out the better vision which yet may 
"grace us in the disgrace of death." His 
inward eye was drawn strongly to his 
friend's sepulchre, sealed and sombre be- 
fore him, and to what had been her, " go- 
ing into dust now almost a month of 
days, almost a lunar year. . . . which, while 
I speak, is mouldering and crumbling into 
less and less dust." But he ended in a 
wholesomer strain, subdued and calm : 
" This good soul being thus laid down 
to sleep in His peace, * I charge you, O 
daughters of Jerusalem, that ye wake her 
not!'" 

The rare little duodecimo which con- 
tains Lady Danvers's funeral sermon was 
printed soon after, " together with other 
Commemorations of Her, by her Sonne 
G. Herbert," and offered to the public at 
the Golden Lion in Paul's Churchyard. 
The commemorations are in Greek and 
Latin. Strangely enough, nowhere is the 
sweet and sage poet of The Temple so set 
upon his prosody, so given to awkward 
pagan conceits, so out of tune with the 
ideals of classic diction. But he, who 



38 



tenderly loved his mother, has given to 
us, in the Memorice Matris Sacrmn, sev- 
eral precious personal fragments, and one 
more precious whole picture of daily hab- 
its in the lines beginning CornelicB sanc- 
tcB : her morning prayer, her bath, and 
the plaiting of her glossy hair ; her house- 
wifely cares, her fit replies, her writing to 
her friends, her passion for music, her 
gentle helpfulness; the long felicity of a 
glad and stainless life, 

" Quicquid habet tellus, quicquid et astra, fruens." 

Dr. Donne died in 1631, whatever was 
yet of earth in his spirit healed and chas- 
tened by long pain. His last remem- 
brance to some he loved was his own 
seal of Christ on the Anchor, " engraven 
very small on heliotropium stones, and 
set in gold, for rings." Many of those to 
whom his heart would have turned, the 
" autumnal beauty " scarce second among 
them, had preceded him out of England. 
But in travelling towards his Maker, he 
had that other sacred hope to " ebb on 
with them," and gloriously overtake them, 
as he traced the epitaph which covered 



39 



him in old St. Paul's: '' Hic licet m oc- 
cidiw cinere, aspicit einn ciijiis nomen est 
Orie?isy The tie between himself and 
her was not unremembered in the next 
generation ; for we find John Donne the 
younger dedicating his father's posthu- 
mous work to Francis, Lord Newport, and 
when making his will, in 1662, bequeath- 
ing also to the same Lord Newport *' the 
picture of St. Anthony in a round frame." 
And thus, in a revived fragrance, the an- 
nals of true friendship close. 

These rapid, ragged strokes of a pen 
make the only possible biography of 
Lady Danvers. When Walton wrote of 
her, he had the entire correspondence 
with Dr. Donne before him.* " There were 
sacred endearments betwixt these two ex- 
cellent persons," he assiajres us, but disap- 
pointingly hurries on into the highway of 
his subject. It is curious that it seems 
impossible now to trace these breathing 
relics, or others from the same source; 

* Dr. Donne's papers were bequeathed to Dr. Henry 
King, the poet-Bishop of Chichester, then residentiary of 
St. Paul's. The " find" were a precious one, if they yet 
survive. 



40 



for George Herbert, in the second elegy 
of the Parentalia, has much to say, and 
very sweetly, of the industry of his moth- 
er's "white right hand," and of the *' many 
and most notable letters, flying over all 
the world." Much detail is utterly lost 
which men who agree with Prosper 
Merimee that all Thucydides would not 
be worth an authentic memoir of As- 
pasia, or even of one of the slaves of 
Pericles, might be glad to remember. A 
copy of a song, a reminiscence of the 
glow and stir of the days through which 
she moved, a guess through a mist at the 
blond head,* the half-imperious carriage, 
the open hand, as she went her ways, like 
Dante's lovely lady, se7itendosi laudare, — 
these are all we have of the daughter of 
England's golden age. It would be easy, 

* The half-romantic reference, which occurs more than 
once in Donne's poems, to his own long-dead arm which 
still shall keep 

"The bracelet of bright hair about the bone," — 

has it nothing to do with this blond head? Ho?ii soil 
qui 7nal y pense. The internal evidences in The Relic, 
with its mention of St. Mary Magdalen, and its boast ot 
purest friendship, and the roguery of the closing line in 
The FuJieralj are somewhat strong, nevertheless. 



were it also just, to throw a dash of color 
into her shadowy history. One would 
like to verify the scene at Eyton, while 
the news of the coming Armada roused 
the lion in Drake, and struck terror into 
the Devon towns ; and to hear the young 
wife, with three lisping Herberts at her 
knee, beguile them with mellow contral- 
to snatches of a Robin Hood ballad, or 
with the sweet yesterday's tale of Zut- 
phen, where their country's dearest gave 
his cup of water to a dying comrade. A 
decade later, before their handsome bluff 
father, her other healthful boys stood up 
to wrestle, and twang their arrows at 
forty paces ; or a rosy daughter stole to 
his side, and asked him of mishaps in Ire- 
land, or of the giant laughter bubbling 
from the "oracle of Apollo " in a London 
street. It is to be believed that one who 
watched events through the insurrection 
of Essex, through Raleigh's dramatic trial, 
reprieve, and execution, through the na- 
tional mourning for the Prince of Wales, 
through the fever for colonization, the 
savage sea-fights, the great intrigues in 
behalf of the Queen of Scots, the relig- 



42 



ious divisions, the muttering parliamen- 
tary thunders, the stress and heat of the 
exciting dawn of the seventeenth century, 
was not unmindful of all it meant to be 
alive, there and then. Magdalen New- 
port's girlhood fell on Lyly's Euphues, 
fresh from the printers ; the Arcadia 
made the talk of Oxford, in her prime ; 
the dusky splendor of Marlowe's Faustus 
was abroad before her second marriage. 
She was, surely, aware of Shakespeare, 
and of the wonder-folio of 1623; of the 
newest delighting madrigals and anti- 
phons set forth by one Robert Jones, 
when every soul in England had the gift 
of music ; of rascal Robert Greene's lov- 
able lyrics, of Wyatt's, Campion's, and 
Drayton's. She wrote no verses, indeed, 
but her familiars wrote them ; her every 
step jostled a Muse. We may assume 
that no growth nor loss in literary circles 
escaped that tender *' perplexing eye." 
Perhaps it glistened from a bench, in the 
pioneer British theatre, on the actors of 
Volpone, and followed silently, behind the 
royal group, the first mincings of the first 
dear Fool in King Lear, one day-after- 



43 



Christmas at Whitehall. Last of all, for 
whim's sake, how any sociologist would 
enjoy having the honest opinion of young 
Lady Herbert, or that of little Mistress 
Donne, concerning the person they could 
but thank and praise ! Ulinam vivisset 
Pepys ! It is a cheat of history that it 
preserves no clearer tint or trace of this 
chosen passer-by. Such, in truth, she 
was, and the quiet vanishing name clings 
to her: the woman of durable gladness, 
happily born and taught, like the soul 
whereof Sir Henry Wotton, who must have 
known her well, made his immortal song. 
Of the gracious figure of Sir John Dan- 
vers we may be said to lose sight ; for he 
seems less gracious, as by a Hindoo trick, 
as soon as it is written that his wife 
departed unto her reward. Comment 
on his character is equal comment upon 
hers, and adds new force to the classic 
episode of a lady philanthropist espous- 
ing a ne'er-do-weel and a featherbrain. 
Aubrey, always happy over a little ultra- 
contemporary gossip, calls it " a disagree- 
able match," disappointing to the bride- 
groom's kindred; but adds that ** he 



44 



married her for love of her wit." Now, 
wit is an admirable magnet, but it is to 
be suspected that there was also, and in 
the immediate vicinity, ** metal more at- 
tractive," as Hamlet says. In the Chelsea 
parish-books is an entry, the first of its 
kind, certifying that Sir John Danvers had 
settled his account with *' the poore," a 
matter of thirty pounds' loan (in which 
the vicar must have connived), for the 
year ending in January of 1628. If the 
payment were, by any hap, in advance, it 
may have fallen in Lady Danvers's own 
lifetime ; and if so, it is quite as likely that 
she paid it, with an admonition ! Her 
" high tides of melancholy," of whose 
true cause she certainly would not have 
complained to Dr. Donne, had some- 
thing to do with this young spendthrift, 
who must have had his wheedling way, 
sooner or later, with such of her am- 
ple revenues as were yet extant. Per- 
haps Lord Herbert of Cherbury was 
both shrewd and charitable, in suppress- 
ing mention of his new relative.* The 

* The famous Autobiography^ indeed, boldly assures 
posterity that Lady Herbert, afier 1597, "continued un- 



45 



longer one looks into the matter, the 
less curious seems his unexplained silence 
concerning this late graft of a family 
hitherto always respectable and always 
loyal. 

There are gleams of subsequent private 
history in the tell-tale records at Chelsea. 
We are not incurably astonished to learn 
that as early as May of 1629 was chris- 
tened Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John 
Danvers and Elizabeth his wife. This 
Lady Elizabeth, arriving providentially 
with her Dauntsey wealth, having borne 
him four children, died, as did his moth- 
er, in 1636; and left him even as she 
found him, none too monogamous. In 
1648 Sir John Danvers again appeared 
at the venerable altars where his first 
saint never had a memorial, loving, hon- 
oring, and cherishing a Mrs. Grace Hewes, 
Hawes, or Hewet, of Kemerton in Glouces- 
tershire, and, as it is to be surmised, lead- 
married," and, in brief, " was the woman Dr. Donne hath 
described her." The acknowledgment of the accuracy of 
that funeral sermon, containing, as it does, its very specific 
Danvers passages, is in our fearless philosopher's best 
style. 



46 



ing her tame fortune by a ribbon. His 
debts and difficulties, not of one but of 
all time, sprout perennially in the regis- 
ters. His indefatigable name, oftener 
than any rival's whatsoever, figures as 
borrowing and paying interest on a forty- 
pound note, which, like a Hydra-head, was 
always forthcoming so soon as it was de- 
molished. This disgraceful business was 
the man's chief concern : for the older 
he grew the deeper and deeper he sank 
into entanglements, particularly after the 
death of the King. It was never doubted, 
in his day, but that this was a judgment 
on the former Gentleman Usher who af- 
fixed hand and seal to the warrant of his 
sovereign's execution.* His own family, 
it is said, as well as the royalist Herberts 
and Newports, dropped his acquaintance ; 
and who knowswhether Mrs. Grace Hewet 
was faithful ? At his favorite Chelsea, in 
the April of 1 65 5, and in about the seventy- 

* There was afterwards, in France, a Gentleman of the 
Bedchamber who had other notions. "Gratitude," said 
Thierry to his executioner in the court-yard of the Ab- 
baye — " gratitude has no opinions. I am leal to my mas- 
ter." 



47 



fourth year of his age, Sir John Danvers 
ended his career by more conventional 
agencies than the rope and the knife, 
which might have befallen him in the 
Stuart triumph of the morrow. His man- 
or fell an immediate forfeit to the crown. 
In 1661, the dead republican was at- 
tainted, and all of his estate which was 
unprotected was declared regal booty. 
The year before his own burial at Daunt- 
sey he laid there, *' to the great grief of 
all good men," the body of his elder son 
Henry, who had just attained his majority. 
The Earl of Danby had died, *' full of hon- 
ors, wounds, and days," in 1643, while this 
Henry, his nephew, was still a hopeful 
child ; and on him alone he had taken 
pains to settle his possessions. But Henry, 
in turn, was persuaded to bequeath the 
major part of them to his father's ever- 
gaping pocket, the remainder reverting 
to one of his two surviving sisters. The 
third Lady Danvers, who lived until 1678, 
had also a son Charles,* who petitioned 
the crown for his paternal rights, but 

* An elder Charles, son of the Lady Elizabeth Danvers, 
was baptized in 1632, and must have died early. 



48 



died in old age, with neither income nor 
issue. 

Clarendon quietly indicts Sir John 
Danvers as a " proud, formal, weak man," 
such as Cromwell " employed and con- 
temned at once." George Bate gives 
him a harder character, saying that he 
" proved his brother to be a delinquent in 
the Rump Parliament, whereby he might 
overthrow his will, and so compass the 
estate himself. He sided with the secta- 
rian party, was one of the King's judges, 
and lived afterwards some years in his 
sin, without repentance." But the same 
accuser adds the saving fact that Dr. 
Thomas Fuller, like Aubrey, was Sir 
John's friend, and, by his desire, preached 
many times at Chelsea, ** where, I am 
sure, he was instructed to repent of his 
misguided and wicked consultations in 
having to do with the murther of that 
just man." One half surmises that had 
the preliminaries of the great struggle 
occurred in her time Magdalen Herbert's 
rather austere and advanced standards 
of right would have stood it out, despite 
her traditions, for the Commons against 



49 



Carolus Agnus.^ But that would have 
been a very different matter from shar- 
ing the feelings of the crude advo- 
cates of revolution and regicide. What 
a misconception of her spotless mo- 
tives must she have borne, had others 
found her in agreement with her vaga- 
bond lord, who treated politics as he 
treated the sacrament of matrimony, 
purely as a makeshift and a specula- 
tion ! 

He was no raw-head-and-bloody-bones, 
this Roderigo - like Briton who won the 
approval of Lord Bacon, and whom George 
Wither thanks for '* those pleasurable re- 
freshments often vouchsafed " ; and whom 
very different men, such as George Her- 
bert and Walton t and peaceable Fuller 
loved. He was a comely creature of 



* Edward Herbert sided eventually with the Parliament, 
which indemnified him for the burning and sacking of 
Montgomery Castle. 

t The six very innocent, cheerful, pious ten-syllable 
stanzas, attributed in The Complete Angler to ''another 
angler, Jo. Davors, Esq.," are not, it is hardly neces- 
sary to add, from our scapegrace's pen. He ceased to 
be " Jo. Davors, Esq./' when Walton was fourteen years 
old. 



some parts, a luckless worldling anxious 
to feather his own nest, and driven by- 
timidity and the desire of gain into 
treacheries against himself. His short, 
thin, and " fayre bodie," common, as 
George Herbert would have us imply, 
to all who bore his name, his elegance, 
his hospitality, and his devotedness to 
his elderly wife, carried him off hand- 
somely in the eyes of her jealous circle. 
His house in Chelsea, commemorated now 
by Danvers Street, adjoined that which 
had been Sir Thomas More's, and was pre- 
sumably a part of the same estate. All 
around it, and due to its master's genuine 
enthusiasm, lay the first Italian garden 
planted in England ; and there, rolling 
towards the Thames, were the long glow- 
ing flower-beds and green orchard-alleys, 
which were also the " horti delicicB domi- 
nce'' recalled thrice in the music of filial 
sorrow. This home of Magdalen Dan- 
vers was pulled down, and built over, in 
1 716. Within its unfallen walls, where 
she spent her serene married life, and 
where she died, she had time to think, 
nevertheless, that she stood, towards even- 



51 



ing, in the ways of folly, and that hers 
was one of those little incipient domestic 
tragedies which must always look amus- 
ing, even to a friend. 



II 

HENRY VAUGHAN 

1621-1695 



HENRY VAUGHAN 




'N his own person, Henry 
Vaughan left no trace in 
society. His life seemed 
to slip by like the running 
water on which he was for- 
ever gazing and moralizing, and his mem- 
ory met early with the fate which he 
hardly foresaw. Descended from the royal 
chiefs of southern Wales whom Tacitus 
mentions, and whose abode, in the day of 
Roman domination, was in the district 
called Siluria,* he called himself the Si- 
lurist upon his title-pages ; and he keeps 
the distinctive name in the humblest of 
epitaphs, close by his home in the glori- 
ous valley of the Usk and the little Hond- 
du, under the shadow of Tretower, the 
ruined castle of his race, and of Pen-y- 

* Siluria comprised the shires of Monmouth, Hereford, 
Glamorgan, Radnor, and Brecon. 



56 



Fan and his kindred peaks. What we 
know of him is a sort of pastoral : how 
he was born, the son of a poor gentleman, 
in 1621, at Newton St. Bridget, in the old 
house yet asleep on the road between 
Brecon and Crickhowel ; how he went 
up to Oxford, Laud's Oxford, with Thom- 
as, his twin, as a boy of sixteen, to be en- 
tered at Jesus College ;* how he took his 
degree (just where and when no one can 
discover), and came back, after a London 
revel, to be the village physician, though 
he was meant for the law, in what had be- 
come his brother's parish of Llansaint- 
fraed ; to write books full of sequestered 
beauty, to watch the most tragic of 
wars, to look into the faces of love and 
loss, and to spend his thoughtful age on 
the bowery banks of the river he had al- 
ways known, his I sea parens florian, to 

* The Reverend H. F. Lyte, Vaughan's enthusiastic 
editor, best known as the author oi Abide with Me, reminds 
us that there was another Henry Vaughan of the same 
college and the same neighborhood at home — a pleasant 
theological person not to be confounded with the poet. It 
was probably he, and not the Silurist, who devoted some 
verses to Charles the First in the book called Eucharis- 
tica Oxonie7isis, 1641. 



57 



which he consecrated many a sweet Eng- 
lish Hne. And the ripple of the not 
unthankful Usk was "distinctly audible 
over its pebbles," as was the Tweed to the 
failing sense of Sir Walter, in the room 
where Henry Vaughan drew his last 
breath, on St. George's day, April 23, 1695. 
He died exactly seventy-nine years after 
Shakespeare, exactly one hundred and 
fifty-five years before Wordsworth. 

Circumstances had their way with him, 
as wnth most poets. He knew the touch 
of disappointment and renunciation, not 
only in life, but in his civic hopes and in 
his art. He broke his career in twain, 
and began over, before he had passed 
thirty ; and he showed great aesthetic 
discretion, as well as disinterestedness, in 
replacing his graceful early verses by the 
deep dedications of his prime. Religious 
faith and meditation seem so much part 
of his innermost nature, it is a little diffi- 
cult to remember that Vaughan consid- 
ered himself a brand snatched from the 
burning, a lawless Cavalier brought by 
the best of chances to the quiet life, and 
the feet of the moral Muse. He suffered 



.r 



58 



most of the time between 1643 and 165 1 
from a sorely protracted and nearly fatal 
illness; and during its progress his wife 
and his dearest friends were taken from 
him. Nor was the execution of the 
King a light event to so sensitive a poet 
and so passionate a partisan. Meanwhile 
Vaughan read George Herbert, and his 
theory of proportional values began to 
change. It was a season of transition 
and silent crises, when men bared their 
breasts to great issues, and when it was 
easy for a childlike soul, 

"Weary of her vain search below, above, 
In the first Fair to find the immortal Love."* 

Vaughan, in his new fervor, did his best 
to suppress the numbers written in his 
youth, thus clearing the field for what 
he afterwards called his ** hagiography " ; 
and a critic may wonder what he found 
in his first tiny volume of 1646, or in Olor 
Iscanus, to regret or cancel. Every un- 
baptized song is " bright only in its own 

* These deep Augustinian lines are Carew's, gay Ca- 
rew's; and they mark the highest religious expression of 
their time 



59 



innocence, and kindles nothing but a 
generous thought " ; and one of them, at 
least, has a manly postlude of love and 
resolve worthy of the free lyres of Love- 
lace and Montrose. Vaughan, unlike 
other ardent spirits of his class, had noth- 
ing very gross to be sorry for; if he was, 
indeed, one of his own 

" feverish souls, 
Sick with a scarf or glove," 

he had none but noble ravings. Happi- 
ly, his very last verses, Thalia Rediviva, 
breaking as it were by accident a silence 
of twenty-three years, indorse with cheer- 
ful gallantry the accents of his youth. 
The turn in his life which brought him 
lasting peace, in a world rocking between 
the cant of the Parliament and resurgent 
audacity and riot, achieved for us a body 
of work which, small as it is, has rare in- 
terest, and an out-of-door beauty, as of 
the natural dusk, '* breathless with adora- 
tion," which is almost without parallel. 
Eternity has been known to spoil a poet 
for time, but not in this instance. Never 
did religion and art interchange a more 



6o 



fortunate service, outside Italian stu- 
dios. Once he had shaken off secu- 
lar ambitions, Vaughan's voice grew at 
once freer and more forceful. In him a 
marked intellectual gain sprang from an 
apparently slight spiritual readjustment, 
even as it did, three centuries later, in 
one greater than he, John Henry New- 
man. 

Vaughan's work is thickly sown with 
personalities, but they are so delicate and 
involved that there is little profit in de- 
taching them. What record he made at 
the University is not apparent ; nor is it 
at all sure that so independent and spec- 
ulative a mind applied itself gracefully 
to the curriculum. He was, in the only 
liberal sense, a learned man, full of life- 
long curiosity for the fruit of the Eden 
Tree. His lines beginning 

"Quite spent with thought I left my cell" 

show the acutest thirst for hidden knowl- 
edge ; he would ** most gladly die," if 
death might buy him intellectual growth. 
He looks forward to eternity as to the 
unsealing and disclosing of mysteries. He 



makes the soul sing joyously to the 
body: 

"I that here saw darkly, in a glass, 

But mists and shadows pass, 
And by their own weak shine did search the springs 

And source of things, 
Shall, with inlighted rays, 

Pierce all their ways !" 

With an imperious query, he encounters 
the host of midnight stars : 

*' Who circled in 
Corruption with this glorious ring?" 

What Vaughan does know is nothing 
to him ; when he salutes the Bodleian 
from his heart, he is thinking how little 
honey he has gathered from that vast 
hive, and how little it contains, when 
measured with what there is to learn 
from living and dying. He had small 
respect for the sinister sciences among 
which the studies of his beloved brother, 
a Neo-Platonist, lay. Though he was no 
pedant, he dearly loved to get in a slap 
against the ignorant whom we have al- 
ways with us. At twenty-five, he printed 
a good adaptation of the Tenth of Juve- 



62 



nal, and flourished his wit, in the pref- 
ace, at the expense of some possible gen- 
tle reader of the parliamentary persua- 
sion who would " quarrel with antiquitie." 
"These, indeed, may think that they 
have slept out so many centuries in this 
Satire, and are now awaked ; which had 
it been still Latin, perhaps their nap had 
been everlasting !" 

He was an optimist, proven through 
much personal trial ; he had sympathy 
with the lower animals, and preserved a 
humorous deference towards all things 
alive, even the leviathan of Holy Writ, 
which he affectionately exalts into **the 
shipmen's fear" and "the comely spa- 
cious whale " ! Vaughan adored his 
friends ; he had a unique veneration for 
childhood ; his adjective for the admi- 
rable and beautiful, whether material 
or immaterial, is "dear"; and his mind 
dwelt with habitual fondness on what 
Sir Thomas Browne (a man after his 
own heart) calls " incomprehensibles, and 
thoughts of things which thoughts do 
but tenderly touch." 

His occupation as a resident physician 



63 



must have fostered his fine eye and ear 
for the green earth, and furnished him, 
day by day, with musings in sylvan soli- 
tudes, and rides abroad over the fresh 
hill-paths. The breath of the mountains 
is about his books. An early riser, he 
uttered a constant invocation to whom- 
ever would listen, that 

" Manna was not good 
After sun-rising; far-day sullies flowers." 

He was hospitable on a limited income.* 
His verses of invitation To his Retired 
Friend, which are not without their 
thrusts at passing events, have a classic 
jollity fit to remind the reader of Ran- 
dolph's ringing ode to Master Anthony 
Stafford. Again and again Vaughan re- 
iterates the Socratic and Horatian song 
of content : that he has enough lands 

* Vaughan apparently enjoyed that privilege of genius, 
acquaintance with a London garret, if we may take au- 
tobiographically the fine brag worthy of the tribe of Henri 
Miirger : 

" I scorn your land, 
So far it lies below me ; here I see 
How all the sacred stars do circle me." 



64 



and money, that there are a thousand 
things he does riot want, that he is 
blessed in what he has. All this does 
not prevent him from recording the phe- 
nomenal ebb-tides of his purse, and from 
whimsically synthesizing on " the thread- 
bare, goldless genealogie " of bards ! No 
sour zealot in anything, he enjoyed an 
evening now and then at the Globe Tav- 
ern in London, where he consumed his 
sack with relish, that he might be '' pos- 
sessor of more soul," and "after full cups 
have dreams poetical." But he was no 
lover of the town. Country life was his 
joy and pride ; the only thing which 
seemed, in his own most vivid phrase, to 
"fill his breast with home." 

" Here something still like Eden looks ! 
Honey in woods, juleps in brooks." 

A literary acquaintance, one unrecog- 
nized N. W., congratulates Vaughan that 
he is able to "give his Muse the swing 
in an hereditary shade." He translated 
with great gusto The Old Man of Verona, 
out of Claud ian, and Guevara's Happi- 
7i€ss of Coimtiy Life ; and he notes with 



65 



satisfaction that Abraham was of his 
rural mind, in " Mamre's holy grove." 
Vaughan was an angler, need it be add- 
ed ? Nay, the autocrat of anglers : he 
was a salmon-catcher. 

With "the charity which thinketh no 
evil," he loved almost everything, except 
the Jesuits, and his ogres the Puritans. 
For Vaughan knew where he stood, and 
his opinion of Puritanism never varied. 
He kept his snarls and satires, for the 
most part, hedged within his prose, the 
proper ground of the animosities. When 
he put on his singing-robes, he tried to 
forget, not always with success, his 
spites and bigotries. For his life, he 
could not help sidelong glances, stings, 
strictures between his teeth, thistle-down 
hints cast abroad in the neatest of gene- 
ralities : 

"Who saint themselves, they are no saints!" 

The introduction to his Mount of Olives 
(whose pages have a soft billowy music 
like Jeremy Taylor's) is nominally in- 
scribed to " the peaceful, humble, and 
pious reader." That functionary must 

5 



66 



have found it a trial to preserve his 
peaceful and pious abstraction, while the 
peaceful and pious author proceeded to 
flout the existing government, in a tow- 
ering rage, and in very elegant caustic 
English. Vaughan was none too godly 
to be a thorough hater. He was genially 
disposed to the pretensions of every hu- 
man creature; he refused to consider his 
ancestry and nurture by themselves, as 
any guarantee of the justice of his views 
or of his superior insight into affairs. 
Yet in spite of his enforced Quaker atti- 
tude during the clash of arms, he nursed 
in that gentle bosom the heartiest loath- 
ing of democracy, and shared the tastes 
of a certain clerk of the Temple "who 
never could be brought to write Oliver 
with a great O." It is fortunate that 
he did not spoil himself, as Wither did, 
upon the wheels of party, for politics 
were his most vehement concern. Had 
he been richer, as he tells us in a playful 
passage, nothing on earth would have 
kept him from meddling with national 
issues. 

The poets, save the greatest, Milton, 



6/ 



his friend Andrew Marvell, and Wither, 
rallied in a bright group under the royal 
standard. Those among them who did 
not fight were commonly supposed, as 
was Drummond of Hawthornden, to re- 
deem their reputation by dying of grief 
at the overthrow of the King. Yet 
Vaughan did not fight, and Vaughan did 
not die of grief. It is so sure that he 
suffered some privation, and it may be 
imprisonment, for his allegiance, that 
shrewd guessers, before now, have 
equipped him and placed him in the 
ranks of the losing cause, where he might 
have had choice company. His generous 
erratic brother (a writer of some note, an 
alchemist, an Orientalist, a Rosicrucian, 
who was ejected from his vicarage in 
1654, and died either of the plague, or of 
inhaling the fumes of a caldron, at Al- 
bury, in 1665, while the court was at Ox- 
ford)* had been a recruit, and a brave 
one. But Henry Vaughan explicitly tells 

* The King lodged at Christchurch, the Queen and 
my Lady Castlemaine (togetlier, alas !) at Merton, amid 
endless hawking, tennis, boating, basset, and general rev- 
elry. 



68 



US, in his Ad Poster os,?LV\d. in a prayer in 
the second part of Si/ex Scintillans, that 
he had no personal share in the constitu- 
tional struggle, that he shed no blood. 
Again he cries, in a third lyric, 

" O accept 
Of his vowed heart, whom Thou hast kept 
From bloody men !" 

This painstaking record of a fact by one 
so loyal as he goes far to prcw., co an 
inductive mind not thoroughly familiar 
with his circumstances, that he considered 
war the worst of current evils, and was 
willing, for this first principle of his phi- 
losophy, to lay himself open to the charge, 
not indeed of cowardice (was he not a 
Vaughan ?), but of lack of appreciation 
for the one romantic opportunity of his 
life. His withdrawal from the turmoil 
which so became his colleagues may seem 
to harmonize w^ith his known moral 
courage and right sentiment ; and fancy 
is ready to fasten on him the sad neu- 
trality, and the passionate " ingemina- 
tion " for "peace, peace," which "took 
his sleep from him, and would shortly 
break his heart," such as Clarendon tells 



69 



US of in his beautiful passage touching 
the young Lord Falkland. But it is 
greatly to be feared that Vaughan, despite 
all the abstract reasoning which arrays 
itself against so babyish and barbarous a 
thing as a battle, would have swung him- 
self into a saddle as readily as any, had 
not ** God's finger touched him." A 
comparison of dates will show that he 
was bedridden, while his hot heart was 
afield with the shouting gentlemen whom 
Mr. Browning heard in a vision r 

"King Charles! and who'll do him right, now? 
King Charles ! and who's ripe for fight, now ? 
Give a rouse : here's in Hell's despite now, 
King Charles!" 

This is the secret of Vaughan's blood- 
guiltlessness. Of course he thanked 
Heaven, after, that he was kept clean of 
carnage; he would have thanked Heaven 
for anything that happened to him. It 
was providential that we of posterity lost 
a soldier in the Silurist, and gained a 
poet. As the great confusion cleared, his 
spirit cleared too, and the Vaughan we 
kuQw, 

"Delicious, lusty, amiable, fair," 



70 



comes in, like a protesting angel, with 
the Commonwealth. Perhaps he lived 
long enough to sum up the vanity of 
statecraft and the instability of public 
choice, driven from tyranny to license, 
from absolute monarchy to absolute an- 
archy ; and to turn once more to his 
"loud brook's incessant fall" as an ob- 
ject much worthier of a rational man's 
regard. Born while James I. was vain- 
gloriously reigning, Henry Vaughan sur- 
vived the Civil War, the two Protector- 
ates, the orgies of the Restoration (which 
he did not fail to satirize), and the Revo- 
lution of " Meenie the daughter," as the 
old Scots song slyly calls her. He had 
seen the Stuarts in and out, in and out 
again, and his seventy -four years, on- 
lookers at a tragedy, were not forced to 
sit through the dull Georgian farce which 
began almost as soon as his grave was 
green. 

Moreover, he was thoroughly out of 
touch with his surroundings. While all 
the world was either devil-may-care or 
Calvin-colored, he had for his character- 
istic a rapt, inexhaustible joy, buoying 



71 



him up and sweeping him away. He 
might well have said, like Dr. Henry 
More, his twin's rival and challenger in 
metaphysics, that he was '* most of his 
time mad with pleasure." While 

"every burgess foots 
The mortal pavement in eternal boots," 

Vaughan lay indolently along a bank, 
like a shepherd swain, pondering upon 
the brood of "green-heads" who denied 
miracles to have been or to be, and wish- 
ing the noisy passengers on the highways 
of life could be taught the value of 

•' A sweet self-privacy in a right soul." 

His mind turned to paradoxes and in- 
verted meanings, and the analysis of his 
own tenacious dreams, in an England of 
pikes and bludgeons and hock-carts and 
wassail - cakes. ** A proud, humoursome 
person," Anthony a Wood called him. 
He was something of a fatalist, inasmuch 
as he followed his lonely and straight 
path, away from crowds, and felt eager 
for nothing but what fell into his open 
hands. He strove little, being convinced 



72 



that temporal advantage is too often 
an eternal handicap. " Who breaks his 
glass to take more light," he reminds us, 
" makes way for storms unto his rest." 
This passive quality belongs to happy 
men, and Vaughan was a very happy 
man, thanks to the faith and will which 
made him so, although he had known ca- 
lamity, and had failed in much. Through- 
out his pages one can trace the affect- 
ing struggle between things desired and 
things forborne. It is only a brave phi- 
losopher who can afford to pen a stanza 
intimate as this : 

** O Thou who didst deny to me 
The world's adored felicity ! 
Keep still my weak eyes from the shine 
Of those gay things which are not Thine." 

He had better possessions than glory un- 
der his hand in the health and peace of 
his middle age and in* his cheerful home. 
He was twice married, and must have 
lost his first wife, nameless to us, but most 
tenderly mourned, in his twenty-ninth or 
thirtieth year. She seems to have been 
the mother of five of his six children. 
Vaughan was rich in friends. He had 



73 



known Davenant and Cartwright, but it is 
quite characteristic of him that the two 
great authors to whom he was especially- 
attached were Jonson and John Fletcher, 
both only a memory at the time of his 
first going to London. Of Randolph, 
Jonson's strong " son," who so beggared 
English literature by dying young in 
1634, Vaughan sweetly says somewhere 
that he w^ill hereafter 

" Look for Randolph in those holy meads." 

Mention of' his actual fellow- workers is 
very infrequent, nor does he mention the 
Shakespeare who had '* dwelt on earth 
unguessed at," and who is believed to 
have visited the estates of the Vaughans 
at Scethrog, and to have picked up the 
name of his merry fellow Puck from 
goblin traditions of the neighborhood. 
Vaughan followed his leisure and his 
preference in translating divers works 
of meditation, biography, and medicine, 
pleasing himself, like Queen Bess, with 
naturalizing bits of Boethius, and much 
from Plutarch, Ausonius, Severinus, and 
Claudian. He did some passages from 



74 

Ovid, but he must have felt sharply the 
violence done to the lyric essence in 
passing it ever so gently from language 
to language, for he lingered over Adrian's 
darling Afiimula vagida blandula, only 
to leave it alone, and to write of it as the 
saddest poetry that ever he met with. 

Not the least of Henry Vaughan's 
blessings was his warm friendship with 
**the matchless Orinda."* This delight- 
ful Catherine Fowler married, in 1647, 
a stanch royalist, Mr. James Philips of 
Cardigan Priory, and as his bride, be- 
came what, in the Welsh solitudes, was 
considered " neighbor " to Vaughan, her 
home being distant from his just fifty 
miles as the crow flies. She had been, 
in her infancy, a prodigy of Biblical quo- 
tation, like Evelyn's little Richard, and 
grew up to be such another precieuse as 
Madame la Comtesse de Lafayette, nee 

* Orinda's own verses, scattered in manuscript among 
her friends, were collected and printed without her knowl- 
edge, and much against her desire, in 1663 : a piece of 
treachery which threw her into a severe indisposition. 
She could therefore condole more than enough with 
Henry Vaughan. Friends were officious creatures in 
those days. 



7^ 



Lavergne ; but we know that she was the 
cleverest and comeliest of good women, 
and Vaughan's association with her must 
have been a perpetual sunshine to him 
and his. She prefixed, after the fashion 
of the day, some commendatory verses 
to his published work. They are not 
only pretty, but they furnish a bit of ade- 
quate criticism. The secular Muse of 
the Silurist is, according to Orinda, 

"Truth clothed in wit. and Love in innocence," 

and has, for her birthright, seriousness 
and a "charming rigour." The last two 
w^ords might stand for him in the fast- 
coming day when nobody will have time 
to discuss old poets in anything but tech- 
nical terms and epigrams. Orinda, with 
her accurate judgment, should have had 
a chance to talk to Mr. Thomas Camp- 
bell, who adorned his Speci7ne7is with the 
one official and truly prepositional phrase 
that " Vaughan was one of the harshest 
of writers, even of the inferior order of 
the school of conceit !" * 

* This, to say the least, was not " pretty " of Campbell, 
who thought so well of the "world's grey fathers" con- 



^6 



While Henry Vaughan was preparing 
for publication the first half of Silex 
Scintillafis as the token of his arrested 
and uplifted youth, Rev. Mr. Thomas 
Vaughan, backed by a few other san- 
guine Oxonians,- and disregardful of his 
twin's exaggerated remorse for the fruits 
of. his profaner years, brought out the 
"formerly written and newly named " 
Olor Iscanus, over the author's head, in 
1650, and gave to it a motto from the 
Georgics. The preface is in Eugenius 
Philalethes' own gallant style, and offers 
a haughty commendation to " beauty from 
the light retired." Perhaps Vaughan's 
earliest and most partial editor felt, like 
Thoreau on a certain occasion, that it 
were well to make an extreme statement, 
if only so he might make an emphatic 
one. He chose to supplicate the public 
of the Protectorate in this wise : ** It was 
the glorious Maro that referred his lega- 
cies to the fire, and though princes are 
seldom executors, yet there came a Caesar 
to his testament, as if the act of a poet 

gregated to gaze at Vaughan's Rainbow that he conveyed 
them bodily into the foreground of his own. 



77 



could not be repealed but by a king. I 
am not, reader, Augustus Vindex : here is 
no royal rescue, but here is a Muse that 
deserves it. The author had long ago 
condemned these poems to obscurity and 
the consumptition of that further fate 
which attends it. This censure gave 
them a gust of death, and they have 
partly known that oblivion which our 
best labors must come to at last. I pre- 
sent thee, then, not only with a book, but 
with a prey, and, in this kind, the first 
recoveries from corruption. Here is a 
flame hath been some time extinguished, 
thoughts that have been lost and forgot, 
but now they break out again like the 
Platonic reminiscency. 1 have not the 
author's approbation to the fact, but I 
have law on my side, though never a 
sword : I hold it no man's prerogative 
to fire his own house. Thou seest how 
saucy I am grown, and if thou dost ex- 
pect I should commend what is published, 
I must tell thee I cry no Seville oranges ; 
I will not say ' Here is fine,' or ' cheap ' : 
that were an injury to the verse itself, 
and to the effect it can produce. Read 



78 



on ; and thou wilt find thy spirit en- 
gaged, not by the deserts of what we call 
tolerable, but by the commands of a pen 
that is above it." All this is uncritical, 
but useful and proper on the part of the 
clerical brother, who writes very much as 
Lord Edward Herbert might be supposed 
to write for George under like conditions ; 
for he knew, according to an ancient ad- 
age, that there is great folly in pointing 
out the shortcomings of a work of art to 
eyes uneducated to its beauties. It was 
just as well to insist disproportionately 
upon the principle at stake, that Henry 
Vaughan's least book was unique and 
precious. He was not, like the majority 
of the happy lyrists of his time, a writer 
by accident ; he was strictly a man of 
letters, and his sign-manual is large and 
plain upon everything which bears his 
name. He indites like a Roman, with 
evenness and without a superfluous syl- 
lable. One cannot italicize him ; every 
word is a congested force, packed to 
bursting with meaning and insistence ; 
the utterance of a man who has been 
thinking all his life upon his own chosen 



79 



subjects, and who unerringly despatches 
a language about its business, as if he 
had just created it. Like Andrew Mar- 
veil's excellent father, " he never broached 
what he had never brewed." It follows 
that his work, to which second editions 
were wellnigh unknown, shows scarcely 
any variation from itself. It carries with 
it a testimony that, such as it stands, it is 
the very best its author can do. Its faults 
are not slips ; they are quite as radical 
and congenital as its virtues. Vaughan 
(to transfer a fine phrase of Mr. W. T. 
Arnold) is "enamoured of perfection," but 
he is fully so before he makes up his 
mind to write, and from the first every 
stroke of his pen is fatal. It transfixes 
a noun or a verb, pins it to the page, and 
challenges a reformer to move or replace 
it. His modest Muse is as sure as Shake- 
speare, as nice as Pope ; she is incapable 
of scruples and apprehensions, once she 
has spoken. What Vaughan says of Cart- 
wright may well be applied to his own 
deliberate grace of diction : 

" Thou thy thoughts hast drest in such a strain 
As doth not only speak, but rule and reign." 



8o 



His verses have the tone of a Vandyck 
portrait, with all its firm pensive elegance 
and lack of shadow. 

Vaughan has very little quaintness, as 
we now understand that word, and none 
of the cloudiness and incorrigible gro- 
tesqueness which dominated his Alex- 
andrian day. He has great temperance ; 
he keeps his eye upon the end, and 
\scarcely falls at all into "the fond adul- 
teries of art," inversions, unscholarly com- 
pound words, or hard-driven metaphors.^ 
If he be difficult to follow, it is only be- 
cause he lives, as it were, in highly oxy- 
genated air ; he is remote and peculiar, 
but not eccentric. ^ His conceits are not 
monstrous ; the worst of them proclaims: 

'* Some love a rose 
In hand, some in the skin ; 

But, cross to those, 
I would have mine within " ; 

which will bear a comparison with Ca- 
rew's hatched cherubim, or with that 
very provincialism of Herbert's which 
describes a rainbow as the lace of Peace's 
coat ! (Those of Vaughan's figures not 
drawn from the open air, where he was 



8i 



happiest, are, indeed, too bold and too 
many, and they come from strange cor- 
ners : from finance, medicine, mills, the 
nursery, and the mechanism of watches 
and clocks. ,' In no one instance, however, 
does he start wrong, like the great in- 
fiuencer, Donne, in The Valediction, and 
finish by turning such impediments as 
"stiff twin - compasses " into images of 
memorable beauty. The Encyclopcedia 
Britafi7iica, like Campbell, finds Vaughan 
*• untunable," and so he is very often. 
But poets may not always succeed in 
metaphysics and in music too. The lute 
which has the clearest and most enticing 
twang under the laurel boughs is Her- 
rick's, and not Donne's; Mr. Swinburne's, 
and not Mr. Browning's. It is to he-ob- 
served that when Vaughan lets go of his 
regrets, his advice, and his growls over 
the bad times, he falls into instant melo- 
dy, as if in that, and not in a rough im- 
pressiveness, were his real strength. His 
blessing for the river Usk flows sweetly 
as the tide it hangs upon : 

" Garlands, and songs, and roundelays, 
And dewy nights, and sunshine days, 
6 \ 



82 



The turtle's voice, joy without fear, 
Dwell on thy bosom all the year! 
To thee the wind from far shall bring 
The odors of the scattered spring. 
And, loaden with the rich arrear, 
Spend it in spicy whispers here." 

Vaughan played habitually with his 
pauses, and unconsciously threw the 
metrical stress on syllables and words 
least able to bear it ; but no sensitive ear 
can be otherwise than pleased at the 
broken sequence of such lines as 

" these birds of light make a land glad 
Chirping their solemn matins on a tree," 

and the hesitant symbolism of 

"As if his liquid loose retinue stayed 
lyingering, and were of this steep place afraid.'' 

The word " perspective," with the accent 
upon the first syllable, was a favorite 
with him ; and Wordsworth approved of 
that usage enough to employ it in the 
majestic opening of the sonnet on King's 
College Chapel.* In short, if Vaughan 

* Per'-spective was, of course, the general pronuncia- 
tion from Shakespeare to Dr. Johnson, and is used with 



83 



be ** untunable," it is because he never 
learned to distil vowels at the expense or 
peril of the message which he believed 
himself bound to deliver, even where hear- 
ers were next to none, and which he tried 
only to make compact and clear. His 
speech has a deep and free harmony of 
its own, to those whom abruptness does 
not repel ; and even critics who turn 
from him to the masters of verbal sound 
may do him the parting honor of ac- 
knowledging the nature of his limitation. 

•' A noble error, and but seldom made, 
When poets are by too much force betrayed !" -^ iu/^ 

Vaughan was a born observer, and in I 
his poetry may be found the pioneer ex- 
pression of the nineteenth-century feel- 
ing for landscape. His canvas is not of- 
ten large ; he had an indifference towards 
the exquisite presence of autumn, and an 
inland ignorance of the sea. But he 

great beauty in Dryden's Ode to the Memory of Mrs. 
Anne Killi^rew. But it is a characteristic word with 
Vaughan, and it was from Vaughan that Wordsworth 
took it. 



84 



f' 



Qould portray depth and distance at a 
stroke, as in the buoyant lines : 

" It was high spring, and all the way 
Primrosed, and hung with shade," 

which etches for you the whole winding 
lane, roofed and floored with beauty ; he 
carries a reader over half a continent in 
his 

"Paths that are hidden from the vulture's eyes," 

and suspends him above man's planet 
altogether with his audacious eagle, to 
whom ** whole seas are narrow specta- 
cles," and who 

"in the clear height and upmost air 
Doth face the sun, and his dispersed hair !" 

Besides this large vision, Vaughan had 
uncommon knowledge how to employ 
detail, during the prolonged literary in- 
terval when it was wholly out of fashion. 
It has been the lot of the little rhyme- 
sters of all periods to deal with the open 
air in a general way, and to embellish 
their pages with birds and boughs ; but 
it takes a true modern poet, under the in- 



85 



fluence of the Romantic revival, to sum 
up perfectly the ravages of wind and 
frost : 

•'Where is the pride of summer, the green prime, 
The many, many leaves all twinkling? — Three 
On the mossed elm ; three on the naked lime 
Trembling ; and one upon the old oak tree " ; 

and it takes another to give the only 
faithful and ideal report of a warbling 
which every schoolboy of the race had 
heard before him : 

*' That's the wise thrush: he sings each song twice 
over. 
Lest you should think he never could recapture 
The first fine careless rapture." 

That Vaughan's pages should furnish this 
patient specification is remarkable in a 
man whose mind was set upon things in- 
visible. His gaze is upon the inaccessible 
ether, but he seems to detect everything 
between himself and heaven. He sighs 
over the inattentive rustic, whom, per- 
haps, he catches scowling by the pasture- 
bars of the wild Welsh downs : ' 

"O that he would hear 
The world read to him !" 



86 



Whatever is in that pleasant world he 
himself hears and sees ; and his inter- 
rupted chronicle is always terse, graphic 
straight from life. He has the inevita- 
ble phrase for every phenomenon, a lit- 
tle low -comedy phrase, sometimes, such 
as Shakespeare and Carew had used be- 
fore him : 

"Deep snow 
Candies our country's woody brow." 

It seems never to have entered the 
primitive mind of Vaughan to love, or 
serve, art and nature for themselves. His 
cue was to walk abroad circumspectly 
and with incessant reverence, because S.n 
all things he found God J He marks, at 
every few rods in the thickets, ** those 
low violets of Thine," and the " breath- 
ing sacrifice " of earth - odors which the 
" parched and thirsty isle " gratefully 
sends back after a shower.* His prayer 

* Vaughan had a relish for damp weather, the thing 
which makes the loveliness of the British isles, and which 
the ungrateful islanders are prone to revile. He never 
passes a sheet of water without looking upward for the 
forming cloud : 

" That drowsy lake 
From her faint bosom breathed thee !" 



87 



is that he may not forget that physical 
beauty is a great symbol, but only a sym- 
bol ; a ** hid ascent " through " masks and 
shadows " to the divine ; or, as Mr. Lowell 
said in one of his last poems, 

"a tent 
Pitched for an Inmate far more excellent." 

\A humanist of the school of Assisi, 
Vaughan was full of out-of-door meek- 
nesses and pieties, nowhere sweeter in 
their expression than in this all-embrac- 
ing valedictory : 

"O knowing, glorious Spirit ! when 
Thou shalt restore trees, beasts, and men, 

Give him among Thy works a place 

Who in them loved and sought Thy face." 

He muses in the garden, at evenfall : 

"Man is such a marigold 
As shuts, and hangs the head." 

Clouds, seasons, and the eternal stars are 
his playfellows ; he apostrophizes our sis- 
ter the rainbow, and reminds her of yes- 
terday, when 

"Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot, 
The youthful world's grey fathers, in one knot," 



88 



lifted anxious looks to her new splendor. 
He is familiar with the depression which 
comes from boding weather, when 

^ . ' "a pilgrim's eye, 

l^^ I Far from relief, 

Measures the melancholy sky." 

?^] He has an artist's feeling, also, for the 
wrath of the elements, which inevitably 
hurry him on to the consummation 

"When Thou shalt spend Thy sacred store 
Of thunders in that heat, 
And low as e'er they lay before 
Thy six-days buildings beat !" 

" I saw," he says, suddenly — 

"I saw Eternity the other night"; 

and he is perpetually seeing things al- 
most as startling and as bright: the 
" edges and the bordering light " of lost 
infancy ; the processional grandeur of 
old books, which he fearlessly calls 

"The track of fled souls, and their Milky Way"; 

and visions of the Judgment, when 

" from the right 
The white sheep pass into a whiter light." 



89 



Here the figure beautifully forecasts a fa- 
mous one of Rossetti's. Light, indeed, 
is Vaughan's distinctive word, and the fa- 
vorite source of his similes and illustra- 
tions. 

If Vaughan's had not been so pro-^ 
foundly moral a nature, he would have 
lacked his picturesque sense of the gen- 
eral, the continuous. That shibboleth, 
"a primrose by the river's brim," is to 
him all the generations of all the yellow 
primroses smiling there since the Druids' 
day, and its mild moonlike ray reflects 
the hope and fear and pathos of the mor- 
tal pilgrimage that has seen and saluted 
it, age after age. Whatever he meets 
upon his walk is drowned and dimmed 
in a wide halo of association and sympa- 
thy. His unmistakable accent marks the 
opening of a little sermon called The 
Timber ; a sigh of pity, tender as a child's, 
over the fallen and unlovely logs : 

*' Sure, thou didst flourish once ! and many springs 
Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers, 
Passed o'er thy head ; many Hght hearts and wings, 
Which now are dead, lodged in thy Hving towers./*"*^ 

* Sometimes erroneously printed "bowers," 



90 



Leigh Hunt once challenged England 
and America* to produce anything ap- 
proaching, for music and feeling, the 
beauty of 

"boughs that shake against the cold, 
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." 

He forgot the closes of these artless 
lines of a minor poet ; or he did not know 
them. 

Vaughan's meek reputation began to 
renew itself about 1828, when four crit- 
ics eminently fitted to appraise his 
worth were in their prime ; but, curiously 
enough, none of these, not even the best 
of them, the same Charles Lamb who 
said a just and generous word for Wither, 
had the satisfaction of rescuing his sunk- 
en name. Lamb's friend, the good soul 
Bernard Barton, seems, however, to have 
known and admired his Vaughan. 

* It was kind of the ever-kind Hunt to include America 
in his enumeration, at a time when the United States were 
supposed by his fellow-countrymen to have no literature 
at all of their own. The circumstance that his challenge 
appeared in the preface to The Book of the Soimet, which 
was edited by Hunt in conjunction with an American, 
and published at Boston in 1868, may help to account 
for the mannerliness of the reference. 



91 



Eight little books, if we count the two 
parts of Silex Scmtillans as one,* enclose 
all of the Silurist's original work. He 
began to publish in 1646, and he practi- 
cally ceased in 1655, reappearing but in 
1678 with Thalia Redlvlva, which was 



* In tlie Letters and Memorials of Archbishop Trench^ 
vol. ii., p. 57, there is a letter bearing upon this point 
from Mr. Frank Millson, dated 1868, which deserves seri- 
ous consideration from Vaughan's forthcoming editors. 
*' I think," he writes the Dean, "that your supposition 
that the 1655 edition is the same book as the one of 1650, 
with a new title-page and additions, can hardly be correct, 
though I know that Lyte, the editor of Pickering's re- 
print, thinks as you do. The preface to the 1655 edition 
is dated September 30, 1654, and contains this passage " 
(not given in the Memorials) " which seems to me to 
refer to the fact of a new edition. A comparison of my 
two copies shows that the 1650 edition consists of half a 
sheet, title and dedication, and 1 10 pages. The second 
edition has title, preface, dedication, motto, the no pages 
of the first edition, with 84 pages of new matter, and a 
table of first lines. A noticeable thing in the arrange- 
ment is that the sheets do not begin with new printer's 
marks, as they might be expected to do if the second 
part were simply new matter added to the first volume, 
but begin with A, the last sheet of the former volume hav- 
ing ended with G. 1 am sorry to trouble you with these 
triflittg details ; but as Vaughan has long been a favorite 
author of mine, they have an interest for me, and if they 
help to show that he was not neglected by readers of his 
own time, I shall be glad." 



92 



not issued under his own supervision. It 
is commonly supposed that his verses 
were forgotten up to the date (1847) of the 
faulty but timely Aldine edition of the 
Rev. H. F. Lyte, thrice reprinted and re- 
vised since then, and until the appearance 
of Dr. Grosart's four inestimable quartos ; 
but Mr. Carew Hazlitt has been fortunate 
enough to discover the advertisement of 
an eighteenth-century reprint of Vaughan. 
As the results of Dr. Grosart's patient ser- 
vice to our elder writers are necessarily 
semi - private, it may be said with truth 
that the real Vaughan is still debarred 
from the general reader, who is, indeed, 
the identical person least concerned about 
that state of affairs. His name is not ir- 
recoverable nor unfamiliar to scholars.* 



* Anthologies and cyclopaedias nowadays, especially 
since Dr. John Brown and Principal Shairp drew atten- 
tion to the Silurist in their pages, are more than likely to 
admit him. It was not so always. Winstanley, sharp as 
was his eye, let Vaughan escape him in his Lives of the 
Poets, published in 1687. He is not in the Theatruin 
Poetaruin, nor in Johnson's Lives. He is in neither of 
Southey's collections. Mr. Palgrave allows him, in The 
Golden Treasiiry^ but a song and a half; Ellis's sheaf of 
excellent Specimens of 1811 furnishes eighteen lines of a 



93 



His mind, on the whole, might pass for 
the product of yesterday ; and he, who 
needs no glossary, may handsomely cede 
the honors of one to Mr. William Morris. 
It is at least certain that had Vaughan 
lately lifted up his sylvan voice out of 

wedding blessing on the Best and Most Accomplished 
Couple apologizing for "their too much quaintness and 
conceit " ; and m Wilimott's Sacred Poets Vaughan occu- 
pies four pages, as against Crashaw's thirty - five, Her- 
bert's thirty-seven, and Wither's one hundred and thirty- 
two. But Vaughan fares well in Dr. George Macdonald's 
England'' s Antipkon, and in Archbishop Trench's //"cz^^^- 
hold Book. Ward's English Poets, in the second volume, 
has a conventional selection from him, as has, at greater 
length, Fields' and Whipple's Family Library of Brit- 
ish Poetry. There is a goodly list entered under Vaugh- 
an's name in Gilfillan's Less-Known British Poets, all 
chosen from his devotional work. Thirty- seven religious 
lyrics again adorn the splendid Treasury of Sacred Song. 
Vaughan 's secular numbers yet await their proper bays, 
although a limited edition of most of them, containing a 
bibliography, was printed in 1893 by J. R. Tutin of Hull. 
Mr. Saintsbury, in his Seventeenth Century Lyrics, has 
a small and very choice group of Vaughan 's songs, and 
Professor Palgrave, having to do with him for the third 
time, gives him large and cordial honor in the eleventh 
volume of Y Cym-mrodor. In Emerson's Parnassus he 
appears but once. He had his most graceful and grateful 
American tribute when Mr. Lowell, long ago, named him 
in passing as " dear Henry Vaughan," in A Certain Con- 
descension in Foreigners. 



94 



Brecknockshire, he would not so readily 
be accused of having modelled himself 
unduly upon George Herbert.* He has 
gone into eclipse behind that gracious 
name. 

Henry Vaughan was a child of thir- 
teen when Herbert, a stranger to him, 
died at Bemerton, and he read him first 
in the sick -chamber to which the five 
years' distresses of his early manhood 
confined him. The reading could not 
have been prior to 1647, for Olor Is- 
canus, Vaughan 's second volume, was ly- 
ing ready for the press that year, as we 
know from the date of its dedication to 
Lord Kildare Digby. As no novice poet, 
therefore, he fell under the spell of a sweet 
and elect soul, who was also a lover of 
vanquished royalty, a convert who had 
looked upon the vanities of the court and 
the city, a Welshman born, and not un- 

* In one of his prefaces, Vaughan hits neatly at the 
crowd of Herbertists : "These aim more at verse than at 
perfection." Where there are noble resemblances, it is 
well to remember that two sides have the right to be heard, 
Mrs. Thoreau used to say : " Mr. Emerson imitates Hen- 
ry !" And she was at least as accurate as the critics who 
annoyed her old age by the reversed statement. 



95 



connected with Vaughan's own ancient 
and patrician house. These were slight 
coincidences, but they served to strength- 
en a forming tie. The Silurist some- 
where thanks Herbert's " holy ever-living 
lines " for checking his blood ; and it was, 
perhaps, the only service rendered of 
which he was conscious. But his endless 
iambics and his vague allegorical titles 
are cast thoroughly in the manner of Her- 
bert, and he takes from the same source 
the heaped categorical epithets, the di- 
dactic tone, and the introspectiveness 
which are his most obvious failings. 
Vaughan's intellectual debt to Herbert 
resolves itself into somewhat less than 
nothing; for in following him with zeal 
to the Missionary College of the Muses, 
he lost rather than gained, and he is al- 
together delightful and persuasive only 
where he is altogether himself. Never- 
theless, a certain spirit of conformity and 
filial piety towards Herbert has betrayed 
Vaughan into frequent and flagrant imi- 
tations. It seems as if these must have 
been voluntary, and rooted in an inten- 
tion to enforce the same truths in all but 



96 



the same words ; for the moment Vaughan 
breaks into invective, or comes upon his 
distinctive topics, such as childhood, nat- 
ural beauty (for which Herbert had an 
imperfect sense), friendship, early death, 
spiritual expectation, he is off and away, 
free of any predecessor, thrilling and un- 
forgettable. Comparisons will not be out of 
place here, for Vaughan can bear, and even 
invoke them. Dryden said in Jonson's 
praise thathewas ''a learned plagiary," and 
nobody doubts nowadays that Shakespeare 
and Milton were the bandit kings of their 
time. There was, indeed, in English let- 
ters, up to Queen Anne's reign, an open 
communism of ideas and idioms astonish- 
ing to look upon ; there is less confisca- 
tion at present, because, outside the pale 
of the sciences, there is less thinking. 
If anyone thin^ can be closer to another, 
for instance, than even Drummond's son- 
net on Sleep is to Sidney's, it is the dress 
of Vaughan's morality to that of George 
Herbert's. Mr. Simcox is the only critic 
who has taken the trouble to contrast 
them, and he does so in so random a 
fashion as to suggest that his scrutiny, 



97 



in some cases, has been confined to the 
rival titles. It is certain that no other 
mind, however bent upon identifications, 
can find a likeness between The Quip and 
The Queer, or between The Tempest and 
Providence. Vaughan's Mutiny, like The 
Collar, ends in a use of the word " child," 
after a scene of strife ; and if ever it were 
meant to match Herbert's poem, dis- 
tinctly falls behind it, and deals, besides, 
with a much weaker rebelliousness. Rules 
and Lessons is so unmistakably modelled 
upon The Church Porch that it scarce- 
ly calls for comment. Herbert's admoni- 
tions, however, are continued, but no- 
where repeated ; and Vaughan's succeed 
in being poetic, which the others are not. 
Beyond these replicas, Vaughan's struct- 
ural genius is in no wise beholden to Her- 
bert's. But numerous phrases and turns 
of thought descend from the master to 
the disciple, undergoing such subtle and 
peculiar changes, and given back, as 
Coleridge would say, with such " usuri- 
ous interest," that it may well be sub- 
mitted whethefTTn this casual list, every, 
borrowing, save two, be not a bettering. 

7 



98 



HERBERT. 

** A throbbing conscience, spurred by remorse, 
Hath a strange force." 

" My thoughts are all a case of knives, 
Wounding my heart 
With scattered smart." 

"And trust 
Half that we have 
Unto an honest faithful grave," 

Teach me Thy love to know, 
That this new light which now I see 

May both the work and workman show : 
Then by a sunbeam I will climb to Thee!" 

' I will go searching, till I find a sun 

Shall stay till we have done, 
A willing shiner, that will shine as gladly 

As frost-nipt suns look sadly. 
Then we will sing and shine all our own day, 

And one another pay ; 
His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so 

twine 
Till even his beams sing, and my music shine." 

{Of prayer.^ 

" Heaven in ordinar}% man well-drest, 
The Milky Way, the bird of Paradise." 

" Then went I to a garden, and did spy 
A gallant flower. 
The crown-imperial : Sure, said I, 

Peace at the root must dwell." 



99 



VAUGHAN. 



A darting conscience, full of stabs and fears." 



"And wrap us in imaginary flights 
Wide of a faithful grave." 

That in these masks and shadows I may see 

Thy sacred way, 
And by these hid ascents climb to that day 

Which breaks from Thee 
Who art in all things, though invisibly!" 

*'0 would I were a bird or star 
Fluttering in woods, or lifted far 

Above this inn 

And road of sin ! 
Then either star or bird would be 
Shining or singing still to Thee ! 



{Of books) 
"The track of fled souls, and their Milky Way." 

" I walked the other day to spend my hour 
Into a field, 
Where I sometime had seen the soil to yield 
A gallant flower." 



HERBERT. 

" But groans are quick and full of wings, 
And all their motions upward be, 
And ever as they mount, like larks they sing : 
The note is sad, yet music for a king." 

*'Joys oft are there, and griefs as oft as joys. 
But griefs without a noise ; 
Yet speak they louder than distempered fears : 
What is so shrill as silent tears ?" 

*'At first Thou gavest me milk and sweetnesses, 
I had my wish and way ; 
My days were strewed with flowers and happi- 
ness ; 

There was no month but May." 

" Only a scarf or glove 
Doth warm our hands, and make them write of 
Love." 

*' I got me flowers to strew Thy way, 
I got me boughs off many a tree ; 
But Thou wast up by break of day, 
And brought Thy sweets along with Thee." 

'•O come! for Thou dost know the way: 
Or if to me Thou wilt not move. 
Remove me where I need not say, 
' Drop from above.' " 

" Sure Thou wilt joy by gaining me 
To fly home like a laden bee." 



VAUGHAN. 



** A silent tear can pierce Thy throne 
When loud joys want a wing; 
And sweeter airs stream from a groan 
Than any arted string." 



*' Follow the cry no more! There is 
An ancient way, 
All strewed with flowers and happiness, 
And fresh as May!*' 



"feverish souls 
Sick with a scarf or glove." 



" I'll get me up before the sun, 

I'll cull me boughs off many a tree ; 
And all alone full early run 

To gather flowers and welcome Thee." 

Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill 
My perspective still as they pass ; 

Or else remove me hence unto that hill 
Where I shall need no glass!" 

'Thy grave, to which my thoughts shall move 
Like bees in storms unto their hive." 



To arraign Vaughan is to vindicate 
him. In the too liberal assizes of litera- 
ture, an idea becomes the property of 
him who best expresses it. Herbert's 
odd and fresh metaphors, his homing 
bees and pricks of conscience and silent 
tears, the adoring star and the comrade 
bird, even his famous female scarf, go 
over bodily to the spoiler. In many an 
instance something involved and diffi- 
cult still characterizes Herbert's diction; 
and it is diverting to watch how the in- 
terfering hand sorts and settles it at one 
touch, and sends it, in Mr. Matthew Ar- 
nold's word, to the " centre." Vaughan's 
mind, despite its mysticism, was full of de- 
spatch and impetuosity. Like Herbert, 
he alludes to himself, more than once, as 
" fierce " ; and the adjective undoubtedly 
belongs to him. There is in Vaughan, 
at his height, an imaginative rush and 
fire which Herbert never knew, a greater 
clarity and conciseness, a far greater re- 
straint, a keener sense both of color and 
form, and so much more deference for 
what Mr. Ruskin calls ** the peerage of 
words," that the younger man could nev- 



I03 



er have been content to send forth a line 
which might mean its opposite, such as 
occurs in the fine stanza about glory in 
the beautiful Quip. It is only on middle 
ground that the better poet and the bet- 
ter saint coUide. Vaughan never could 
have written 

" O that I once past changing were 
Fast in Thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!" 

or the tranquil confession of faith : 

" Whether I fly with angels, fall with dust, 
Thy hands made both, and I am there : 
Thy power and love, my love and trust 
Make one place everywhere!" 

For his best is not Herbert's best, nor his 
worst Herbert's worst. It is not Vaughan 
who reminds us that " filth " lies under a 
fair face. He does the ** fiercer " thing : 
he goes to the Pit's mouth in a trance, 
and ** hears them yell." Herbert's no- 
blest and most winning art still has its 
stand upon the altar steps of The Tem- 
ple ; but Vaughan is always on the roof, 
under the stars, like a somnambulist, or 
actually above and out of sight, '* pin- 



I04 



nacled dim in the intense inane "; ab- 
sorbed in larger and wilder things, and 
stretching the spirits of all who try to 
Jollow him. Herbert has had his reward 
in the world's lasting appreciation ; and 
though Vaughan had a favorable opinion 
of his own staying powers, nothing would 
have grieved him less than to step aside, 
if the choice had lain between him and 
his exemplar. Or re-risen, he would cry 
loyally to him, as to that other Herbert, 
the rector of Llangattock and his old 
tutor : *' Pars vertat patri, vita posthwna 
tibir 

Vaughan, then, owed something to Her- 
bert, although it was by no means the 
best which Herbert could give ; but he 
himself is, what Herbert is not, an an- 
cestor. He leans forward to touch Cow- 
per and Keble ; and Mr. Churton Collins 
has taken the pains to trace him in Ten- 
nyson. 

The angels who 

" familiarly confer 
Beneath the oak and juniper," 

invoke an instant thought of the Milton 



I05 



of the Allegro; and the. fragrant winds 
which linger by Usk, " loaden with the 
rich arrear," appear to be Milton's, too. 
His austere music first sounded in the 
public ear in 1645, one year before Vaughan, 
much his junior, began to print. It would 
seem very unlikely that a Welsh physi- 
cian should be beholden long after to the 
manuscriptsof the Puritan stripling, close- 
kept at Cambridge and Horton ; but it 
is interesting to find the prototype of 
Vaughan's charming lines about Rachel, 

" the sheep-keeping Syrian maid," 

in the Epitaph on the Marchioness of Win- 
chester ^ dating from 1631.* Vaughan's 
dramatic Fleet Street, 

** Where the loud whip and coach scolds all the way," 



* Mr. R. H. Stoddard owns a copy of the first edition 
of N ier ember g' s Meditations^ translated by Vaughan in 
1654, and published the following year, which has upon 
the title-page an autographic " J. M." supposed, by every 
evidence, to be Milton's. If it be so, the busy Latin Sec- 
retary, meditating his grand work, must have been, on 
his part, a reader and a lover of the man who was almost 
his equal at golden phrases. 



io6 



might as well be Swift's, or Crabbe's ; and 
his salutation to the lark, 

** And now, as fresh and cheerful as the light, 
Thy little heart in early hymns doth sing," 

is like a quotation from some tender son- 
net of Bowles, or from his admirer, the 
young Coleridge who instantly outstepped 
him. Olor, Silex, and Thalia establish un- 
expected relationships with genius the 
most remote from them and from each 
other. The animated melody of poor 
Rochester's best songs seems deflected 
from 

" If I were dead, and in my place," 

addressed to Amoret,* in the Poems of 
1646. The delicate simile, 

*' As some blind dial, when the day is done, 
Can tell us at midnight there was a sun," 

and 

*' But I am sadly loose and stray, 
A giddy blast each way. 
O let me not thus range : 
Thou canst not change ! ' ' 

* Congreve and Waller employ the same rather too ob- 
vious love-name for their serenaded divinities. 



I07 



(a verse of a poem headed by an extract, 
in the Vulgate, from the eighth chapter 
to the Romans), come home with a smile 
to the lover of Clough. Vaughan was 
that dangerous person, an original think- 
er ; and the consequence is that he com- 
promises a great many authors who may 
never have heard of him. It is admitted 
now that we owe to his prophetic lyre 
one of the boasts of modern literature. 
Dr. Grosart has handled so well the ob- 
vious debt of Wordsworth in The Inti- 
maiions of hninortality, and has proven 
so conclusively that Vaughan figured in 
the library at Rydal Mount, that little 
need be said here on that theme. In 
Corruption, Childhood, Looking Back, and 
The Retreat, most markedly in the first, 
lie the whole point and pathos of 

*' Trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From Heaven, which is our home." 

Few studies are more fascinating than 
that of the liquidation, so to speak, of 
Vaughan's brief, tense, impassioned mon- 
odies into **the mighty waters rolling 
evermore " of the great Ode. It is Hoi- 



io8 



inshed's accidental honor that he is lost 
in Shakespeare, and incorporated with 
him. So with Vaughan : if shorn of his 
dues, he still remains illustrious by virt- 
ue of one signal service to Wordsworth, 
whom, in the main, he distinctly fore- 
shadows. Yet it is no unpardonable here- 
sy to be jealous that the ** first sprightly 
runnings "of a classic should not be bet- 
ter known, and to prefer their touching 
simplicity to the grandly adult and theory- 
burdened lines which everybody quotes. 
In the broad range of English letters we 
find two persons whose normal mental 
habits seem altogether of a piece with 
Vaughan's : a woman of the eighteenth 
century, and a philosopher of the nine- 
teenth. The lovely Petition for an Abso- 
lute Retreat, by Anne, Countess of Win- 
chelsea (whose genius was the charming 
trouvaille of Mr. Edmund Gosse), might 
pass for Vaughan's, in Vaughan's best 
manner; and so might 

" Their near camp my spirit knows 
By signs gracious as rainbows," 

as indeed the whole of Emerson's ever- 
memorable Forerunners, itself a mate for 



rog 



The Retreat : or rather, had these been 
anonymous lyrics of Vaughan's own day, 
it would have been impossible to persuade 
a Caroline critic that he could not name 
their common author. 

Our poet had a curious fashion of coin- 
ing verbs and adjectives out of nouns, and 
carried it to such a degree as to challenge 
pre-eminence with Keats. 

" O how it bloods 
And spirits all my earth!" 

is part and parcel of the young cries of 
Endymion. When Vaughan has discov- 
ered something to produce a fresh effect, 
he is not the man who will hesitate to 
use it ; and this mannerism occurs fre- 
quently : ''our grass straight russets," 
''angel'd from that sphere," "the moun- 
tained wave," ** He heavened their walks, 
and with his eyes made those wild shades 
a Paradise." A little informality of this 
sort sometimes justifies itself, as in the 
couplet ending the grim and powerful 
Charnel-House : 

"But should wild blood swell to a lawless strain, 
One check from thee shall channel it again !" 



And Henry Vaughan shares also with 
Keats, writing three hundred years later, 
a defect which he had inherited, together 
with many graces, directly from Ben Jon- 
son:* the fashion of crowding the sense 
of his text and the pauseless voice of his 
reader from the natural breathing-place 
at the end of a line into the beginning or 
the middle of the next line. More than 
any other, except Keats in his first period, 
he roughens, without always strengthen- 
ing, his rich decasyllabics, by using what 
Mr. Gosse has happily classified as the 
"overflow." 

Though the Silurist had in him the pos- 
sibilities of a great elegiac poet, and his 
laments for his dead are many and mem- 
orable, there is not one sustained mas- 
terpiece among them ; nothing to equal 

* Vaughan openly wears jewels which belong to Jonson. 

" Go seek thy peace in war : 
Who falls for love of God shall rise a star !" 

wrote brave Father Ben ; and no Englishman of spirit, 
between 1642 and the Restoration, was likely to forget it. 
The passage certainly clung to Vaughan's mind, for he 
assimilated it later in a sweet line all for peace : 

" Do thou the works of day, and rise a star." 



or approach, for example, Cowley's Ode 
on the Death of Mr. William Hervey, in 
the qualities which abide, and are visited 
with the honors of the class-book and 
the library shelf. Yet Vaughan's elegies 
are exquisite and endearing ; they haunt 
one with the conviction that they stop 
short of immortality, not because their 
author had too little skill, but because, 
between his repressed speech and his ex- 
treme emotions, no art could make out 
to live. He had a deep heart, such as 
deep hearts will always recognize and 
reverence : 

"And thy two wings were grief and love." 

In the face of eternity he seems so to 
accord with the event which all but de- 
stroys him, that sorrow inexpressible be- 
comes suddenly unexpressed, and his 
funeral music ends in a high enthusiasm 
and serenity open to no misconception. 
Distance, and the lapse of time, and his 
own utter reconciliation to the play of 
events make small difference in his utter- 
ance upon the old topic. The thought of 



his friend, forty years after, is the same 
mystical rapture : 

"O could I track them! but souls must 

Track one the other; 
And now the spirit, not the dust, 

Must be thy brother; 
Yet I have one pearl by whose light 

All things I see, 
And in the heart of death and night, 

Find Heaven and thee." 

Daphnis, the eclogue to the memory 
of Thomas Vaughan, is the only one of 
these elegies which, possessing a surplus 
of beautiful lines, is not even in the least 
satisfying. " R. Hall," " no woolsack sol- 
dier," who was slain at the siege of Pon- 
tefract, won from Henry Vaughan a pas- 
sionate requiem, which opens with a gush 
of agony, " I knew it would be thus !" as 
affecting as anything in the early ballads; 
and the battle of Rowton Heath took 
from him *' R. W.," the comrade of his 
youth. But it was in one who bore his 
sovereign's name (hitherto unidentified, 
although he is said to have been the sub- 
ject of a ** public sorrow ") that Vaughan 
lost the friend upon whom his whole nat- 
ure seemed to lean. The soldier-heart in 



"3 



himself spoke out firmly in the cry he 
consecrated To the Pious Me7)iory of C. W. 
Its masculine dignity; the pride and soft 
triumph which it gathers about it, ad- 
vancing; the plain heroic ending which 
sweeps away all images of remoteness 
and gloom, in 

"Good-morrow to dear Charles! for it is day,'' 

can be compared to nothing but an agi- 
tato of Schubert's mounting strings, slow- 
ing to their major chord with a courage 
and cheer that bring tears to the eyes. 
Vaughan's tender threnodies would make 
a small but precious volume. To the 
Pious Memory, with Thou that Knowest 
for Whom I Moicr7i, Silence and Stealth 
of Days, Joy of my Life while Left ine 
Here, / Walked the other Day to spend 
my Hour, The Morning Watch, and Be- 
yond the Veil, are alone enough to give 
him rank forever as a genius and a good 
man. 

" C. W.'s " death was one of the things 
which turned him forever from temporal 
pursuits and pleasures. Of his first wife 
we can find none but conjectural traces 

8 



114 



in his books, for he was shy of using the 
beloved name. The sense of those de- 
parted is never far from him. The air 
of melancholy recollection, not morbid, 
which hangs over his maturer lyrics, is 
directly referable to the close-following 
calamities which estranged him from the 
presence of ** the blessed few," and sent 
him, as he nobly hoped, 

"Home from their dust to empty his own glass." 

His thoughts centred, henceforward, in 
their full intensity, on the supernatural 
world ; nay, if he were irremediably de- 
pressed, not only on the persistence of 
resolved matter, by means of which bur- 
ied men come forth again in the color of 
flowers and the fragrance of the wind, 
but even on the physical damp and dark 
which confine our mortality. It is the 
poet of dawn and of crisp mountain air 
who can pack horror on horror into his 
nervous quatrains about Death : 

*'A nest of nights; a gloomy sphere 

Where shadows thicken, and the cloud 
Sits on the sun's brow all the year, 
And nothing moves without a shroud." 



"5 



This is masterly ; but here, again, there is 
reserve, the curbing hand of a man who 
holds, with Plato, a wilful indulgence in 
the " realism " of sadness to be an actual 
crime. Vaughan's dead dwell, indeed, as 
his own mind does, in "the world of 
light." As his corporeal sight is always 
upon the zenith or the horizon, so his 
fancy is far away, with his radiant ideals, 
and with the virtue and beauty he has 
walked with in the flesh. He takes his 
harp to the topmost hill, and sits watch- 
ing 

** till the white-winged reapers come." 

He thinks of his obscured self, the child 
he was, and of *' the narrow way " (an 
ever-recurrent Scriptural phrase in his 
poetry) by which he shall " travel back." 
To leave the body is merely to start 
anew and recover strength, and, with it, 
the inspiring companionship of which he 
is inscrutably deprived. 

Chambers' Cyclopccdm made an epic 
blunder, long ago, when it ascribed to 
this gentlest of Anglicans a ** gloomy sec^ 
tarianism." He, of all religious poets, 



ii6 



makes the most charming secular read- 
ing, and may well be a favorite with the 
heathen for whom Herbert is too deco- 
rative, Crashaw too hectic and intense, 
Cowper too fearful, and Faber too fluent; 
Lyra Apostolica a treatise, though a glo- 
rious one, on Things which Must be Re- 
vived, and Hymns A7icie7it and Modern 
an exceeding weariness to the spirit. It 
is a saw of Dr. Johnson's that it is impos- 
sible for theology to clothe itself in at- 
tractive numbers; but then Dr. Johnson 
was ignorant of Vaughan. It is not in 
human nature to refuse to cherish the 
" holy, happy, healthy Heaven " which he 
has left us (in a graded alliteration which 
smacks of the physician rather than of 
the "gloomy sectarian "), his very social 
" angels talking to a man," and his bright 
saints, hovering and smiling nigh, who 

" are indeed our pillar-fires 
Seen as we go ; 
They are the city's shining spires 
We travel to." 

Who can resist the earnestness and can- 
dor with which, in a few sessions, he 
wrote down the white passion of the last 



117 



fifty years of his life ? No English poet, 
unless it be Spenser, has a piety so simple 
and manly, so colored with mild thought, 
so free from emotional consciousness. 
The elect given over to continual po- 
lemics do not count Henry Vaughan as 
one of themselves. His double purpose 
is to make life pleasant to others and to 
praise God ; and he considers that he is 
accomplishing it when he pens a com- 
pliment to the valley grass, or, like Cole- 
ridge, caresses in some affectionate stro- 
phes the much-abused little ass. All this 
liberal sweetness and charity heighten 
Vaughan's poetic quality, as they deepen 
the impression of his practical Christian- 
ity. The nimbus is about his laic songs. 
When he talks of moss and rocks, it is as 
if they were incorporated into the ritual. 
He has the genius of prayer, and may be 
recognized by ** those graces which walk 
in a veil and a silence." He is full of 
distinction, and of a sort of golden idio- 
syncrasy. Vaughan's true ** note " is — 
Vaughan. To read him is like coming 
alone to a village church-yard with trees, 
where the west is dying, in hues of lilac 



and rose, behind the low ivied Norman 
tower. The south windows are open, the 
young choir are within, and the organist, 
wath many a hushed unconventional in- 
terlude of his own, is rehearsing with 
them the psalm of " pleasures for ever- 
more." 



Ill 
GEORGE FARQUHAR 

1677-1707 



GEORGE FARQUHAR 




HERE is a narrow dark Es- 
sex Street West in the city 
of Dublin, running between 
Fishamble Street and Essex 
Gate, at the rear of the Lower 
Blind Quay. The older people still blunt- 
ly call it what it was called before 1830 : 
Smock Alley. On its north side stands 
the sufficiently ugly church of SS. Mi- 
chael and John. The arched passage 
still in use, parallel with the nave of this 
church, was the entrance to a theatre on 
the same site ; what is now the burial 
vault was once the pit, full of ruddy and 
uproarious faces. The theatre, erected 
about 1660, which had a long, stormy and 
eventful history, was rebuilt in 1735, and 
having been turned into a warehouse, fell 
into decay, to be replaced by a building of 
another clay. But while it was still itself, 



it was great and popular, and the lane 
between Trinity College and the old 
arched passage was choked every night 
with the press of jolly youths, who, as 
Archbishop King pathetically complain- 
ed, appeared to love the play better than 
study ! Among those who hung about 
Smock Alley like a barnacle in the years 
1694 and 1695, was a certain George Far- 
quhar, son of William,* a poor Lon- 
donderry clergyman of the Establish- 
ment; a long- faced peculiar lad of mild 
mien but high spirits. He had come 

* Incipit Annus Academicus Die Julii 9* 1694. 



Die Georgius 
17a Farquhare 
Julii I Sizator 



filius 

Gulielmi 

Farqhare 

Clerici 



Natus 
London- 
derry 



ibidem edu- 

catus sub 

magistro 

Walker 



Eu. Lloyd 

('college 

tutor; 



This matriculation entry from the register of Trinity does 
away with our sizar's presumed father, Rev. John Far- 
quhar, prebendary of Raphoe. We hear nothing more, 
ever after, of the Farquhar family, who henceforth leave 
young George to his own profane devices ; nor can any 
certainty be attached to additional information, sometimes 
proffered, that the father had seven children in all, and 
held a living of only one hundred and fifty pounds a 
year. One other point is fixed by the entry, to wit : if 
George Farquhar was seventeen in the July of 1694, he 
cannot have been born in 1678. 



123 



from the north, under episcopal patron- 
age, to wear a queer dress among his so- 
cial betters, to sweep and scour and car- 
ry tankards of ale to the Fellows in hall ; 
and incidentally, to imbibe, on his own 
part, the lore of all the ages. The major 
event in his history is that, instead of sit- 
ting up nights over Isocrates de Face, 
he slipped off to see Robert Wilkes and 
the stock company, and to decide that 
acting, or, as he afterwards sarcastically 
defined it, "tearing his Lungs for a Live- 
lihood," was also the thing for him. 
Wherefore, at eighteen, either because 
his benefactor. Bishop Wiseman of Dro- 
more, had died, or else, as is not very 
credibly reported, because he was cash- 
iered from his class, Master Farquhar, 
cut loose from his old moorings, applied 
to Manager Ashbury of the Dublin Thea- 
tre, and to such avail that he was able 
presently to make his own appearance 
there as no less a personage than Othello. 
He had a weak voice and a shy presence ; 
but the public encouraged him. One of 
his first parts was that of Guyomar, Mon- 
tezuma's 5^ounger brother, in Dryden's 



124 



tragedy of The India7i Emperor. In the 
fifth act, as soon as he had declaimed to 
Vasquez in sounding sing-song: 

"Friendship with him whose hand did Odmar kill? 
Base as he was, he was my brother still ! 
But since his blood has washed away his guilt, 
Nature asks thine for that which thou hast spilt," 

he made, according to stage directions, 
a fierce lunge at his too conciliatory foe. 
Guyomar had armed himself, inadver- 
tently, with a genuine sword, and Vas- 
quez came near enough to being killed 
in the flesh. The man eventually recov- 
ered ; but it shows of what impressiona- 
ble stuff Farquhar was made, that his 
mental horror and pain, during that mo- 
ment while he believed he had slain a 
fellow -creature, should have turned the 
course of his life. He left the stage; 
nor would he return to it. Some eight 
years after, indeed, he visited Dublin 
again, and on the old boards played Sir 
Harry Wildair for his own benefit ; but 
this was at a time when he forced him- 
self to undertake all honorable chances 
of money-making, out of his consuming 
anxiety for his family. 



125 



Wilkes and his wife returned to Lon- 
don, and the lad Farquhar went with 
them. He obtained a commission in the 
army from the Earl of Orrery ; he was in 
Holland on duty during a part of the 
year 1700, and came back to England 
with one of her earliest military red coats 
on his back, in the train of his much-ap- 
proved sovereign, William III. He had 
already written, thanks to Wilkes and 
his incessant urging, his first two plays, 
and had seen them successful at Drury 
Lane;* he had also overheard with en- 
thusiasm, at the Mitre Tavern in St. 
James's Market, Mistress Nance Old- 
field, an orphan of sixteen, niece of the 
proprietress, reading The Scornful Lady 
behind the bar. Captain Vanbrugh was 
duly told of Farquhar's delight and ad- 
miration, and on the strength of them in- 
troduced the girl to Rich, who did few 
things so good in his lifetime as when he 
put her upon the stage at fifteen shillings 
a week. It was not long before this dis- 
tinguished actress and generous woman, 

* This was the theatre built by Sir Christopher Wren 
in 1672. 



126 



destined to lend her gayety and beautiful 
bearing to the interpretation of Far- 
quhar's women, enlivened the town as the 
glorious Sylvia of The Recruiting Officer, 
who can ** gallop all the morning after a 
hunting-horn, and all the evening after 
a fiddle." 

'* We hear of Farquhar at one time," 
says Leigh Hunt, in a pretty summary, 
'* in Essex, hare-hunting (not in the style 
of a proficient) ; at another, at Richmond, 
sick; and at a third, in Shropshire on a 
recruiting party, where he was treated 
with great hospitality, and found material 
for one of the best of his plays." 

Love and a Bottle inaugurated the vogue 
of the Farquhar comedy ; and Wilkes, 
whose name in London carried favor and 
precedence, was the Roebuck of the cast. 
Its successors, T/ie Constant Couple (with 
a framework transferred and adapted 
from its author's earlier Adventures of 
Covent Garden), and its sequel. Sir Har- 
ry Wildair, again championed by the 
" friendly and indefatigable " Wilkes, who 
impersonated the engaging rakish heroes, 
had long runs, and firmly established 



127 



their author's fame. In 1702 Farquhar 
produced The Inconstant (which he had 
perverted from Fletcher's Wild Goose 
Chase, as if a fit setting were sought for 
the wonderfully effective last act of his 
own devising) ; and after The Inconsta7tt, 
The Twin Rivals. The Stage Coach, a 
one -act farce in which he had a col- 
laborator,* dates from 1704, and The Re- 
cruiting Officer from 1706; The Beaux' 
Stratagem was written in the spring 
of 1707. This is a working record of 
barely nine years ; it represents a secure 
and continuous artistic advance; and it 
should have brought its patient origina- 
tor something better than the privilege 
of dying young, ** broken - hearted," as 
he confessed to Wilkes, "and without a 
shilling." 

Farquhar had but the trifling income 
of an officer's pay on which to support 
his wife and his two little daughters. He 
seems to have sought no political prefer- 

* Peter Anthony Motteux, the wild and clever linguist 
and dramatist, who made the best English translation of 
Don Quixote. The Stage Coach, itself an adaptation, 
has little merit beyond its liveliness. 



[28 



ment, nor did his numerous patrons put 
themselves out to advance him, although 
these were the very days when men of 
letters were crowded into the public ser- 
vice. Ever and anon he received fifteen 
guineas, then a very handsome sum, for a 
play. Perhaps, like his rash gallants, he 
had " a head to get money, and a heart to 
spend it." He greatly wished success, for 
the sake of those never absent from his 
thought ; and he complained bitterly 
when the French acrobats and rope- 
dancers took from The Twin Rivals the 
attention of pleasure-seeking Londoners, 
much as poor Haydon complained after- 
wards of the crowds who surged down 
Piccadilly, to behold not his ** Christ's 
Entry into Jerusalem " at all, but General 
Tom Thumb, holding court under the 
same roof. 

When Farquhar's health was breaking, 
and debts began to involve him at last, 
it appears that the Earl of Ormonde, 
his general, prompted him to sell his 
commission in order to liquidate them, 
and agreed to give him a captaincy. Or, 
as is yet more probable, in view of the 



129 



fact that Farquhar was already known by 
the title of captain, he was urged to sell 
out of the army, on a given pledge that 
preferment of another sort awaited him. 
His other industrious devices to secure 
support for four having missed fire, he 
gladly performed his part of the trans- 
action, only to experience a fatal delay 
on the part of my Lord Ormonde, whose 
mind had strayed to larger matters. In 
fine, the unkept promise hurt the sub- 
altern to the heart; he sank, literally 
from that hour, of grief and disquietude. 
Lintott the stationer, and his old friend 
Wilkes stood manfully by him, one with 
liberal payment in advance, and one with 
affectionate furtherance and gifts ; but 
Farquhar did not rally. It was to Wilkes, 
as everybody knows, that he penned this 
most touching testament : *' Dear Bob, I 
have not anything to leave thee to per- 
petuate my memory but two helpless 
girls. Look upon them sometimes ! and 
think of him who was, to the last mo- 
ment of his life, thine." The end came 
on or about April 29, 1707, George Far- 
quhar being just thirty years of age. 
9 



30 



While he lay dying in Soho, his last and 
best comedy was in progress at the new 
magnificent Haymarket, and his audi- 
ences, with a barren benevolence not un- 
characteristic of the unthinking human 
species, are said to have wept for him. 
He was buried in the parish church-yard 
of St. Martin-in-the-Fields,* where Nell 
Gwynne's contrite ashes lay, and where 
her legacied bells tolled for his passing. 

Farquhar's name is always coupled 
with those of Congreve, Wycherley, and 
Vanbrugh, although in spirit and also in 
point of time he was removed from the 
influences .which formed them. Many 
critics, notably Hazlitt, Macaulay, and 
Thackeray, have allowed him least men- 
tion of the four, but he is, in reality, the 
best playwright among them ; and it is 
greatly to the credit of a discreditable 

* The register of burial is dated a month later than 
the received date of his death. It reads simply: 23 May, 
George Falkwere, M." The initial is the sapient sex- 
ton's indication that this was neither a W (woman) nor a 
C (child). The spelling of the name betokens its usual 
and original pronunciation. The present famous porti- 
coed church was not built for nineteen years after Far- 
quhar died. 



131 



period if lie be taken as its represent- 
ative. He had Vanbrugh's exuberant 
vivacity, Congreve's grace, Wycherley's 
knack of climax. Wycherley, retiring 
into private life when Farquhar was 
born, lived to see his exit ; Etherege was 
then at his zenith ; Dryden's All for 
Love was in the printer's case, and Ot- 
way, almost on the point of his two great 
works, was coming home ragged from 
Flanders : Otway, whose boyish ventures 
on the stage, and whose subsequent sol- 
diering, Farquhar was so closely to follow. 
Pope, and a gentler observer, Steele, 
found Farquhar 's dialogue " low," and so 
it must have sounded between the brave 
surviving extravagances of the Jacobean 
buskin and the modulated utterances of 
Cato and The Revenge. A practical talent 
like Farquhar s was bound to provoke 
hard little words from the Popes who 
shrank from his spontaneous style, and 
the Steeles who could not approve of the 
gross themes he had inherited. For sheer 
good-breeding, some scenes in The Way 
of the World can never be surpassed ; 
they prove that one cannot hold the stage 



132 



by talk alone. It is fortunate for Far- 
quhar that he could not emulate the 
exquisitely civilized depravities of Con- 
greve's urban Muse. But his dialogue is 
not *' low " to modern tastes ; it has, in 
general, a simple, natural zest, infinite- 
ly preferable to the Persian apparatus 
of the early eighteenth century. Even 
he, however, can rant and deviate into 
rhetoric, as soon as his lovers drop upon 
one knee. More plainly in Farquhar's 
work than in that of any contemporary, 
we mark the glamour of the Caroline 
literature fading, and the breath of life 
blowing in. An essentially Protestant 
nationalism began to settle down upon 
England for good and all with William 
and Mary, and it brought subtle changes 
to bear upon the arts, the trades, the 
sports, and the manners of the people. 
In Farquhar's comedies we have the re- 
flex of a dulling and strengthening age ; 
the fantasticalities of the last three reigns 
are all but gone ; the Vandyck dresses 
gleam and swish no longer. Speech be- 
comes more pert and serviceable, in a 
vocabulary of lesser range; lives are vul- 



33 



garizing, that is, humanizing, and getting 
closer to common unromantic concerns; 
no such delicately unreal creature as Mill- 
amant, all fire and dew and perfumery, — 
Millamant who could not suffer to have 
her hair done up in papers written in 
prose, and who, quite by herself, is a vin- 
dication of what Mr. Allibone is pleased 
to call ** Lamb's sophistical and mischiev- 
ous essay,"— walks the world of Farquhar. 
With him, notwithstanding that the sorry 
business to be despatched is the same old 
amorous intrigue, come in at once less 
license, less affectation, less Gallicism. 
He reports from the beginning what he 
himself apprehends; his plays are short- 
hand notes, albeit timid in character, upon 
the transitional and prosaic time. His 
company is made up of individuals he 
had seen in a thousand lights at the 
Spread Eagle and the Rummer; in the 
Inner Temple and in St. James's Park ; 
in barracks domestic and foreign ; and 
in his native place, where adventurers, 
eloquent in purest Londonderry,* stum- 

* The not altogether foolish censure has been cast upon 
the rogue Teague in The Twin Rivals that he speaks an 



134 



bled along full of whiskey and ideas. 
He anticipates certain phases of Private 
Ortheris's thorough -going love of Lon- 
don, and figures his exiled Dicky as "just 
dead of a consumption, till the sweet 
smoke of Cheapside and the dear per- 
fume of Fleet - ditch " made him a man 
again. In this laughing affectionate ap- 

impossible brogue, which might as well be Welsh. Far- 
quhar did not succeed in transferring to paper the weird and 
unlovely Ulster dialect with which he was familiar in boy- 
hood, and which had figured already in the third act oiHejiry 
the Fifth, in Jonson's Irish masque, in Shadwell's Lanca- 
shire Witches; which was simultaneously being used in 
his farce The Committee^ by Dryden's friend Howard, 
and which was afterwards to have good corroboration in 
Aytoun's Massacre of the MacPhersoji. Farquhar em- 
ploys it twice elsewhere, passably well in the case of 
Torlough Macahone of the parish of Curroughabegley 
(the personage who built a mansion-house for himself and 
his predecessors after him), and with lamentable flatness in 
that of Dugard in his last comedy. Dugard is a rival of 
the nursery-maid dear to almanac humorists, who is wont 
to exclaim : " Can't ye tell boi me accint that 'tis Frinch 
Oi am I" It was one of Farquhar' s inartistic mistakes that 
he made no loving study of this or of anything touching 
nearly his own people. His Irishmen, with the exception 
of Roebuck, are either rascals or characterless nobodies. 
The name Teague, or Teig, which Howard had also em- 
ployed, is old and pure North Irish ; and no less pleasant 
an authority than George Borrow reminds us in the 
Romano Lavo-Lil that it is Danish in origin. 



135 



prehension of the local and the temporal 
lies Farquhar's whole strength or weak- 
ness. From the poets of the Restora- 
tion there escapes, most incongruously, 
now and then, something which betokens 
a sense of natural beauty, or even a recog- 
nition of the divine law ; but Farquhar 
is not a poet, and this spray from the 
deeps is not in him. He perceives noth- 
ing that is not, and opens no crack or 
chink where the fancy can air itself for a 
moment and 

— *'step grandly out into the infinite." 

Such a lack would not be worth remark- 
ing in the debased and insincere writers 
who but just preceded him. But from 
the very date of his first dealings with 
London managers, idealism was abroad, 
and a man with affinities for **the things 
that are more excellent " need have feared 
no longer to divulge them, since the 
court and the people, if not the domi- 
nant town gentry, were with him. Far- 
quhar had neither the full moral illumi- 
nation nor the will, though he had the 
capacity, to lend a hand to the blessed 



136 



work waiting for the opportunist. He was 
young, he was of provincial nurture ; he 
was carried away by the theatrical tradi- 
tion. Yet his mind was a Medea's ket- 
tle, out of which everything issued clean- 
er and more wholesome. Despite the 
prodigious animal spirits of his charac- 
ters, they conduct their mad concerns 
with sense and moderation ; they manage 
tacitly to proclaim themselves as tem- 
porarily "on a tear," as going forth to 
angle in angling weather, and as likely to 
lead sober citizen lives from to-morrow 
on. Under bad old maintained condi- 
tions they develop traits approximately 
worthy of the Christian Hero. They 
"look before and after." They are to 
be classed as neutrals and nondescripts, 
for they have all the swagger of their 
lax progenitors, and none of their dev- 
iltry. They belong professionally to 
one family, while they bear a tanta- 
lizing resemblance to another. Far- 
quhar himself, perhaps unaware that par- 
tisanship is better than compromise, 
made his bold toss for bays both spirit- 
ual and temporal. Imitating, as novices 



f37 



will ever do, the art back of him, he 
adopted the claim to approbation which 
that art never dreamed of. In the very- 
good preface to The Twin Rivals (which 
has always been approved of critics rath- 
er than of audiences), he sets up for a 
castigator of vice and folly, and he offers 
to appease "the ladies and the clergy," 
as, in some measure apparent to the 
more metaphysical among them, he 
may have done. His friend, Mr. John 
Hopkins, the author of A7nasia, invited, 
on behalf of The Constant Couple, the 
commendation of Collier. That open- 
minded censor may have seen with 
satisfaction, in the general trend of 
Farquhar's composition, the less and less 
dubious day-beams of Augustan decency. 
Though Farquhar did not live, like Van- 
brugh and the magnanimous Dryden, to 
admit the abuse of a gift, and to deplore 
it, he alone, of the minor dramatists, 
seems all along to have had a negative 
sort of conscience better than none. His 
instincts continually get the better not 
only of his environment, but of his prac- 
tice. Some uneasiness, some misgiving, 



138 



are at the bottom of his homely material- 
ism. He thinks it best, on the whole, to 
forswear the temptation to be sublime, 
and to keep to his cakes and ale ; and 
for cakes and ale he had an eminent 
and inborn talent. What was ably said 
of Hogarth, the great exemplar, will cov- 
er all practicians of his school : '* He 
had an intense feeling for and com- 
mand over the impressions of senses and 
habit, of character and passion, the seri- 
ous and the comic ; in a word, of nature 
as it fell in with his own observation, or 
came into the sphere of his actual expe- 
rience. But he had little power beyond 
that sphere, or sympathy for that which 
existed only in idea. He was 'conformed 
to this world, not transformed.'" Or, 
as Leigh Hunt, in his beautiful memoir, 
adds, with acuteness, of Farquhar him- 
self : " He could turn what he had ex- 
perienced in common life to the best ac- 
count, but he required in all cases the 
support of ordinary associations, and could 
not project his spirit beyond them." In 
short, Farquhar lacked imagination. He 
had insight, however, of another order, 



139 



which is his praise, and which distin- 
guishes him from all his fellows : he had 
sympathy and charity. 

The major blot on the literature of the 
English stage of the period is not its 
libertinism, but rather its concomitant 
utter heartlessness. ** Arrogance " (so, ac- 
cording to Erasmus, that ascetic scholar 
Dean Colet used to remind his clergy) 
" is worse than a hundred concubines." 
The slight sporadic touches of tender- 
ness, of pity, of disinterested generosity, 
to be found by patient search in Con- 
greve, come in boldly with Farquhar, 
and boldly overrun his prompter's books. 
Vanbrugh's scenes stand on nothing but 
their biting and extravagant sarcasm. 
As Congreve's characters are indiscrim- 
inately witty, so Vanbrugh's are univer- 
sally and wearisomely cynical, and at the 
expense of themselves and all society. 
His women in high life have no individ- 
uality; they wear stings of one pattern. 
The genial conception of the shrewd, 
material Mrs. Amlet, however, in The 
Co7ifederacyy is worthy of Farquhar, and 
certainly Congreve himself could not 



140 



have bettered her in the execution. 
Etherege's typical Man of Mode is a tis- 
sue of untruth, hardness, and scorn, all 
in impeccable attire ; a most mournful 
spectacle. Thinking of such dainty mon- 
sters, Macaulay let fly his famous invec- 
tive against their creators : " Foreheads 
of bronze, hearts like the nether mill- 
stone, and tongues set on fire of hell !" 
George Farquhar may be exempted al- 
together from this too -deserved com- 
pliment. There is honest mirth in his 
world of fiction, there is dutifulness, 
there is true love, there are good wom- 
en ; there is genuine friendship between 
Roebuck and Lovewell, between True- 
man and Hermes Wouldbe, between Aim- 
well and Archer, and between the green 
Tummas of The Recruiting Officer and 
his Costar, whom he cannot leave behind. 
Sylvia, Angelica, Constance, Leanthe, 
Oriana, Dorinda, free-spoken as they are, 
how they shine, and with what morning 
freshness, among the tiger-lilies of that 
evil garden of the Restoration drama ! 
These heroines are an innovation, for 
they are maids, not wedded wives. As 



141 



to the immortal periwigged young bloods 
their suitors, they are *' real gentlemen," 
as Hazlitt, who loved Farquhar, called 
them, "and only pretended impostors;" 
or, to quote Farquhar's latest editor, Mr. 
A. C. Ewald, they are " always men and 
never yahoos." Their author had no 
interest in " preferring vice, and render- 
ing virtue dull and despicable." Their 
praise may be negative, but it establishes 
a wide wall of difference between them 
and the fops and cads with whom they 
have been confounded. In their con- 
versations, glistening with epigram and 
irony, malevolence has no part ; they 
sneer at no virtue, they tamper with 
none ; and at every turn of a selfish 
campaign they find opportunity for hon- 
orable behavior. From the mouths of 
these worldlings comes satire, hot and 
piping, against worldliness ; for Farquhar 
is as moralizing, if not as moral, as he 
dares be. Some of the least attractive 
of them, the most greedy and contriv- 
ing, have moments of sweetly whimsical 
and optimistic speech. Thus Benjamin 
Wouldbe, the plotter against his elder 



142 



brother in The Twin Rivals, makes his 
adieu after the fashion of a true gal- 
lant : " I scorn your beggarly benevo- 
lence ! Had my designs succeeded, I 
would not have allowed you the weight 
of a wafer, and therefore will accept 
none." The same person soars again 
into a fine Aurelian speculation : ** Show 
me that proud stoic that can bear suc- 
cess and champagne ! Philosophy can 
support us in hard fortune, but who can 
have patience in prosperity?" Over his 
men and women in middle life Farquhar 
lingers with complacence entirely for- 
eign to his colleagues, to whom mothers, 
guardians, husbands, and other apple- 
guarding dragons were uniformly ridicu- 
lous and odious. Justice Balance is as 
attractive as a hearth-fire on a Decem- 
ber night ; so is Lady Bountiful. Over 
Fairbank, the good goldsmith, Farqu- 
har gets fairly sentimental, and permits 
him to drop unaware into decasylla- 
bics, like the pastoral author of Lor7ia 
Doom, His rogues are merely roguish, 
in the softened sense of the word ; in his 
panorama, though black villains come 



143 



and go, it is only for an instant, and to 
further some one dramatic effect. He 
has eulogy for his heroes when they de- 
serve it, and when they do not you may 
trust him to find a compassionate excuse ; 
as when poor Leanthe feelingly says of 
her lover that " his follies are weakly 
founded upon the principles of honor, 
where the very foundation helps to un- 
dermine the structure." Even Squire Sul- 
len, for his lumpishness, is divorced with- 
out derision, and in a peal of harmless 
laughter. Farquhar, indeed, is all gentle- 
ness, all kindness. He had the pensive 
attitude of the true humorist towards the 
world he laughed at ; his characters let 
slip words too deep for their living au- 
ditors. It is curious that to a Restora- 
tion dramatist, "a. nether millstone," we 
should owe a perfect brief description of 
ideal married life. In the scene of the 
fourth act of Sir Harry Wildairy where 
Lady Lurewell, with her " petrifying af- 
fectation," is trying to tease Sir Harry 
out of all endurance on the subject of 
his wife (whom he believes to be lost or 
dead), and the degree of affection he had 



144 



for her, he makes reply : " My own heart 
whispered me her desires, 'cause she her- 
self was there ; no contention ever rose 
but the dear strife of who should most 
oblige — no noise about authority, for nei- 
ther would stoop to command, where 
both thought it glory to obey." This is 
meant to be spoken rapidly, and not 
without its tantalizing lack of emphasis ; 
but what a pearl it is, set there in the 
superlatively caustic dialogue ! English 
chivalry and English literature have no 
such other golden passage in their ru- 
brics, unless it be the famous tribute to 
the Lady Elizabeth Hastings that **to 
love her was a liberal education," or 
Lovelace's unforgettable song : 

*' I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
Loved I not Honour more!" 

The passage takes on a very great acci- 
dental beauty when we remember that it 
required courage, in its time and place, 
to have written it. It is characteristic 
also of Farquhar that it should be intro- 
duced, as it is, on the top wave of a viva- 
cious and stormy conversation, which im- 



145 



mediately sweeps it under, as if in proof 
that he understood both his art and his 
audience. The conjugal tie, among the 
leaders of fashion, was still something 
to laugh at and to toy with. Captain 
Vanbrugh, from whom nobody need ex- 
pect much edification, had put in the 
mouth of his Constant, in a play which 
was a favorite with Garrick, a bit of 
sense and sincerity quoted, as it deserved 
to be, by Hunt : " Though marriage be a 
lottery in which there are a wondrous 
many blanks, yet there is one inestimable 
lot in which the only heaven on earth is 
written." And again : " To be capable 
of loving one is better than to possess a 
thousand." This was in 1698, and Far- 
quhar therefore was not first, nor alone, 
in daring to speak for the derided idea 
of wedlock. Steele was soon to arise as 
the very champion of domestic life ; and 
English wit, since he wrote, has never 
subsisted by its mockery of the condi- 
tions which create 

"home-keeping days and household reverences." 

But it was Farquhar who spoke in be- 



146 



half of these the most memorable word 
of his generation. After that lofty evi- 
dence of what he must be suspected to 
have been, it is well to see, as best we 
may, what manner of man George Far- 
quhar was. And first let us take some 
extracts from his own account of him- 
self, ** candid and modest," as Hunt 
named it. 

He gives us to understand that he had 
an ardent temperament, held in check 
by an introspective turn of thought, 
by natural bashfulness, and by habits 
of consideration for others. The por- 
trait is drawn from a letter in the Mis- 
cellanies, of '* a mind and person gener- 
ally dressed in black," and might have 
come bodily, and with charming grace, 
from The Spectator, ** I have very lit- 
tle estate but what lies under the cir- 
cumference of my hat . . . and should I 
by misfortune come to lose my head, I 
should not be worth a groat." " I am 
seldom troubled by what the world calls 
airs and caprices, and I think it an idiot's 
excuse for a foolish action to say : * 'Twas 
my humor.' " " I cannot cheerfully fix 



47 



to any study which bears not a pleasure 
in the application." " Long expectation 
makes the blessing always less to me ; I 
lose the great transport of surprise." " I 
am a very great epicure ; for which rea- 
son I hate all pleasure that's purchased 
by excess of pain. I can't relish the jest 
that vexes another. In short, if ever I 
do a wilful injury, it must be a very great 
one." ** I have many acquaintances, very 
few intimates, but no friend ; I mean, in 
the old romantic way." " I have no se- 
cret so weighty but that I can bear it in 
my own breast." ** I would have my pas- 
sion, if not led, at least waited on by my 
reason." This last text, repeated else- 
where by Farquhar, which is the counter- 
part of one in Sir Philip Sidney's Area- 
dm, has interest from the lips of a child 
of the ** dancing, drinking, and unthink- 
ing time." Farquhar's face, in the old 
prints, is wonderfully of a piece with 
these amiable reports : a handsome, hu- 
mane, careworn, melancholy young face, 
the negation of the contemporary idea of 
the man about town. His constitution, 
at its best, was but frail. " You are as 



:48 



dear to me," he says, pathetically, to his 
Penelope, "as my hopes of waking in 
health to-morrow morning." 

A tradition has been received without 
question by his many critics and biogra- 
phers, that his chief characters, all cast in 
the same animated mould, are but incog- 
nitos of himself. Highly -colored pro- 
jections of himself, with latent traits ex- 
aggerated, and formed mental restraints 
removed, they may indeed be. The pub- 
lic, which loves identifications, insisted 
on finding him revealed in his Archers 
and Sir Harrys. Whether or not the 
dramatists of the day had universally the 
Rembrandtesque whim of painting them- 
selves into their own foregrounds, they 
were obstinately supposed to do so, with 
Etherege in Young Bellair, with Otway 
in Jaffier. But the real Farquhar 

— "courteous, facile, sweet, 
Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride," 

with his reserve, his simple dress, his thin, 
agreeable voice, his early reputation at 
college for uncongeniality, acting in every 
emergency whither we can fairly trace 



149 



him with deliberate high-mindedness, is 
far enough from the temper of his rest- 
less and jocund creations. He wished 
to remove the impression that he could 
have been his own model ; for he took 
pains to inscribe The Inconstant to his 
classmate, Richard Tighe, and to com- 
pliment him upon his kinship with Mira- 
bel, "a gay, splendid, easy, generous, 
fine young gentleman "; the applauded 
type, in short, of all that Farquhar's 
heroes set out to be. Again, lest he 
should pass for a realist as rabid as 
Mademoiselle de Scudery, who pinioned 
three hundred and seventy of her ac- 
quaintances between the covers of Clelie, 
Farquhar adds this warning to his en- 
thusiastic dedication of The Recruiting 
Officer " to all friends round the Wrekin ": 
" Some little turns of humor that I met 
with almost within the shade of that fa- 
mous hill gave the rise to this comedy ; 
and people were apprehensive that, by 
the example of some others, I would 
make the town merry at the expense of 
the country gentleman. But they forgot 
that I was to write a comedy, not a libel." 



15° 



He disclaims everywhere, with the same 
playful decisiveness, the interpretations 
put upon his designs and actions by the 
world of overgrown infants which he en- 
tertained. Endowed with courage and 
much personal charm, he had small chance 
of distinguishing himself upon the field, 
and for the most part shone at a garri- 
son mess ; but he had led a not inadvent- 
urous life, in which were incidents of 
the most pronounced melodrama, with a 
touch of mystery to enhance their value 
for the curious. Farquhar had travelled, 
and with an open, not an insular mind ; 
he had, by his own confession, too deep 
an acquaintance with wine, and with the 
nightingales of Spring Gardens, outsing- 
ing ** the chimes at midnight. Master 
Shallow"; he had been, in short, though 
with " melancholy as his every-day ap- 
parel," alive and abroad as a private Whig 
of the Revolution, shy of ladies' notice 
till it came, and proud of it ever after. 
When he printed, in his twenty-first year, 
The Adventures of Coveiit Garde7i, he 
added to it a boy's bragging motto : Et 
quorum pars magna fui. The inference 



151 



seems to have clung closer to him than 
he found comfortable. He complains, 
not without significance, in his prose 
essay upon the drama, that the public 
think any role compounded of " practical 
rake and speculative gentleman is, ten to 
one, the author's own character." With 
the incident which furnished its thrilling 
closing scenes to The Inconstant , Far- 
quhar had probably no connection ; he 
takes pains to state that the hero of it 
was the Chevalier de Chastillon, quite as 
if he feared another confusion of himself, 
as fearless and quick-witted a man, with 
the "golden swashbucklers" of his imag- 
ination. The rumor which confounded 
them with him has next to nothing to 
support it. Fortune, fashion, foolhardi- 
ness, impudence, were not the stars which 
shone upon Farquhar's nativity. Such 
exotic and epic virtues as may flourish 
under these, such as do adorn the delight- 
ful dandies he depicted, surely belonged 
to him in person ; and his quiet habit of 
living apart and letting the town talk, 
fixed to perpetuity the belief that he had 
exploited himself vicariously, for good 



»S2 



and all, upon the stage. Certain quali- 
ties of his, certain brave truces established 
with adverse conditions, force one to con- 
sider him with more attention and re- 
spect than even his brilliant pen invites. 
It is something to find him diffident and 
studious in a bacchanalian society, and 
with such scrupulous sensitiveness that a 
mere inadvertence in boyhood forbade 
him ever to fence again ; * but his out- 
standing characteristic, the thing which 
sets him apart from his brocaded dramatis 
personcEy is his known lasting devotion to 
the welfare of his family, and his admira- 
ble behavior in relation to his early and 
extraordinary marriage. 

In 1702, Farquhar issued a charming 
and little-known miscellany, called Love 
and Business, " a collection of occasionary 
verse and epistolary prose." The poetic 

* Dear Dick Steele, in 1701, while Captain of Fusi- 
leers, had a duel thrust upon him ; and in parrying, his 
sword pierced his man. To his remorse may be ascribed 
his hatred of the custom of duelling, expressed afterwards 
on every occasion. Steele owed his start in life to James 
Butler, Duke of Ormonde, who entered him among the 
boys on the Charterhouse foundation. This peer was 
grandfather to the man who failed George Farquhar. 



153 



exercises are of small importance ; but 
the other data (which survive as a hin- 
drance, rather than as a help, to biogra- 
phers) come near being of very definite 
value. All manner of futile guesses have 
been expended upon the identification of 
his Penelope. It is given to no mouser 
to name her with certainty ; but, despite 
the gossip of the greenroom, now as ever 
too ready to weave romances about the 
name of George Farquhar, internal evi- 
dence is strongly against her having been 
Anne Oldfield. Yet this is the supposi- 
tion of most of his editors. Commenting 
upon one passage touching some villanous 
stratagem from which Farquhar says he 
was able to rescue a friend in the Low 
Countries, a friend with whom he after- 
wards condoles upon a robbery she had 
undergone, Leigh Hunt adds that this may 
have been the woman whom Farquhar 
subsequently made his wife. A widow, 
whose Christian name was Margaret, but 
of whom we know so little else that we 
cannot say whether she was English, or 
whether her age considerably exceeded 
his, conceived a passionate attachment for 



'54 



him, and managed to have it represented 
to him from several quarters not only 
that she was kindly disposed towards him, 
but that it would be well for his opening 
career if he should seek her hand, as she 
had estates and revenues. Eventually, 
after we know not what hesitations nat- 
ural to a fastidious temperament, he pro- 
posed to her and was accepted, and it 
soon transpired that the bride w^as quite 
as penniless as himself. Hunt does not 
follow out his own hint in the matter of 
the robbery, though the question, when 
carefully considered, has a vital import. 
If the victim were indeed the lady whom 
Farquhar married later, and if she wxre 
indeed robbed, it should signify that she 
must then have been possessed of some 
wealth, so that the report given to Far- 
quhar could not have been, up to that 
time at least, a lie. On the other hand, 
casuists must decide whether, again in 
the event of the victim having been cor- 
rectly identified by Hunt, the robbery 
itself may not have been an invention 
meant, after Farquhar had declared his 
allegiance, to quicken his sympathy, and 



iSS 



to soften the coming revelation that the 
robbery could never have resulted, owing 
to a defect in the premises ! There is 
very much else about the Letters which 
is confusing and inconsistent. They are 
so disconnected, and they vary so in 
tone and manner, as to suggest a doubt 
whether, if not altogether imaginary, they 
could have been meant for any one per- 
son. A lady is announced as having re- 
turned them for publication ; she dresses 
in mourning, and resides now on the 
Continent, now in London or in the 
country ; her suitor very explicitly states 
that he had long solicited in vain the 
honor of her hand ; and, in the end, with 
farewells and an abrupt and unexplained 
severing, he gives up the quest, with his 
own admission that he has lost her and 
that her heart "had no room for him." 
Now that the recipient of this corre- 
spondence, Anne Oldfield or another, 
should have returned it for commercial 
purposes, not having been won by the 
very real passion exhibited in parts of it, 
seems somewhat peculiar ; but to accept 
as fact that Farquhar himself actually 



156 



asked these letters back from her, and 
printed them as they stood, is, under the 
conditions, absurd, and irreconcilable with 
our knowledge of his character from other 
and prior sources. Hunt further suggests 
that the Miscellany was gathered togeth- 
er in some press of pecuniary trouble; 
and its title, indeed, may hint at a whim- 
sical expectation that Love, being har- 
nessed and sent abroad to arouse curiosi- 
ty among readers, may return in the way 
of Business to headquarters. But Far- 
quhar, in his bachelor days, had a fair in- 
come, and would not have been so likely 
to hear the wolf at the door as he was 
later, when that sound would awake in 
him a dread not ominous to himself alone. 
It is possible that the undiscovered reg- 
ister of his marriage bears the date of 
1702 or even of 1701 ; if it were so, that 
might explain the issue of his only book 
not in dramatic dress, and the emergency 
which called it forth. It is difficult in- 
deed to suppose, although modern deli- 
cacy in these matters was just then a 
somewhat unknown quantity, that we 
have between its covers genuine love-let- 



157 



ters hot from the pen. Steele, of an Au- 
gust morning nine years later, inserted in 
The Spectator as the communication of a 
third person, six of his own notes to his 
comely and noble fiancee, Mary Scur- 
lock. But Farquhar had not Steele's 
earnestness and love of circumstantial 
truth, nor his zest for pointing a moral. 
Or was this publication the sort of thing 
he would be likely, for a not unworthy 
purpose, to do ? Was he, in reality, a 
shade more obtuse and misguided than 
Miss Fanny Brawne .'^ Rather let us be- 
lieve the Letters a work of fiction, and 
only founded largely upon various by- 
gone moods and incidents of the fore- 
going two years, which for one reason 
or another might interest buyers. Such 
is the description to ** dear Sam " of Dry- 
den's erratic funeral, which is almost 
too keenly rhetorical a summing-up to 
have been wTitten the next day, or the 
thoughtful and sensible surveys of the 
Dutch. The amatory epistles, with their 
leaven of reality, are presumably edited 
out of all recognition. They make no 
defined impression ; they do not move 



158 



forward ; they veil impenetrably the traits 
of the person addressed, who is made to 
appear as a vanishing unrelenting goddess, 
deaf and blind to George Farquhar plead- 
ing his best. Whatever were the facts, 
the report of them is chivalrous. As- 
sume for a moment that his wife stands 
behind the whole of this correspondence, 
or even behind the latter part of it, and 
what seemed to constitute a little betray- 
al in the very worst taste turns out to be 
an innocent joke. Of course the *' lady " 
(or one of the ladies) lent the manuscripts 
to the printers ; of course Farquhar orig- 
inated, in order to give color to Mistress 
Farquhar's known pretence of riches, and 
their joint subsequent poverty, the mag- 
nificent thieving practised upon the nev- 
er-thieved and the unthievable ! One 
can fancy them both, in their hard chairs 
in the bare room, laughing well and long, 
between tears of anxious hope that the 
more personal element in the Miscellany 
might fetch them from the Covent Gar- 
den book-stalls a parcel of fagots and a 
dinner. 

Aside from all theorizing, it is pleas- 



159 



ant to know that their life together was 
a happy one. The consensus of all wit- 
nesses, in the significant absence of any- 
contrary voice, affirms that Farquhar, 
having been trapped, bore himself like 
the gentleman he was. Two children 
were born to him, to brighten, but also to 
sadden, his brief and diligent life. Under 
his added anxieties he did his royal best ; 
he addressed to their mother, from first 
to last, no word of reproach for her fraud. 

" The secret pleasure of the generous act 
Is the great mind's great bribe." 

In its fragrance of faith and patience and 
self-sacrificing tenderness, their domestic 
story can almost rank next after that sa- 
cred one of Charles and Mary Lamb. 

Farquhar's widow, who had loved him, 
appears to have loved his memory.* She 

* Mrs. Farquhar published in 171 1 an octavo volume 
of the Plays^ Letters, a7id Verses. Among the verses fig- 
ures a poem of six cantos dedicated to the victorious Earl of 
Peterborough, entitled Barcelona. " It was found among 
my dear deceased husband's writings," says the widow, 
in her prefatory note. He was not at the siege, and it 
is possible that the six cantos were a manuscript copy 
of the effusion of some former comrade. Farquhar was 



i6o 



did not survive her husband many years ; 
for there is reason to suppose she died 
before 17 19, and in penury. Poor Far- 
quhar used to declare that the dread that 
his family might suffer want was far more 
bitter to him than death. Wilkes gave 
at his theatre, in the May of 1708, a bene- 
fit for Margaret Farquhar, and twelve 
years later he was acting as trustee for 
the young girls Mary and Anne Marga- 
ret, whose pension is said' by the Encyclo- 
pcedia Britannica to have amounted to 
thirty pounds; it was obtained through 
the exertions of Edmund Challoner, to 
whom their father had dedicated his Mis- 
cellam'es. Wilkes seems to have again 
aided both the orphans when they came 
of age. One of them married an humble 
tradesman, and died early; the other was 
living in 1764, wholly uneducated, and, as 
it is said on small authority, as a maid- 



the author of several songs, one, of highly didactic com- 
plexion, having emanated from him at the reputed age of 
ten. Of these, only two are of fair lyrical quality : the 
page's song in Love and a Bottle^ and " Tell me, Aurelia, 
tell me, pray," which Robert Southey included in his 
collection. 



i6i 



servant. Farquhar's elder biographers 
and editors, Ware, Genest, Chetwood, and 
the rest, writing in this daughter's life- 
time, were apparently unconscious of her 
existence ; but the thought of her father's 
child, old, neglected, and in a menial po- 
sition, served to anger Leigh Hunt as 
late as 1842. 

Fear and forecast of what is only too 
likely to befall the helpless, depressed 
Farquhar in the April long ago, when he 
lay dying of consumption, and when, 
with a fortitude which sustained him 
under his bitter disappointment, for six 
weeks, he wrote and finished his masterly 
comedy The Beaux Stratage7n. As he 
drew near the end of the second act he 
was told to give up hope ; but the sec- 
ond act closes with the famous rattling 
catechism between Cherry and Archer, 
and the best bit of verse its author ever 
made ; and the third starts in with the 
hearty sweet laugh — Anne Oldfield's 
laugh — of that " exquisite creature, Mrs. 
Sullen." On a fund of grief, Farquhar 
enriched his London with a legacy of 
perpetual merriment. The unflagging 



1 62 



impetus of his dramas, above and beyond 
their very real intrinsic merit, accounts 
for their great and yet unforfeited pop- 
ularity. They descend to us associated 
with the intellectual triumphs of the 
most dear and dazzling names upon the 
English stage ; they move upon the 
wings of intelligence and good - nature ; 
they **give delight, and hurt not." They 
swarm with soldiers, welcome figures 
long tacitly prohibited from the boards, 
as too painful a reminder of the Civil 
Wars. They begin with the clatter of 
spurs, the bang of doors, the hubbub 
of bantering voices in " a broadside of 
damme's." Sergeant Kite appears, fol- 
lowed by a mob on whom he lavishes 
his wheedling, inspiriting gibble-gabble ; 
Roebuck enters in fantastic colloquy 
with a beggar ; Sir Harry crosses the 
road, singing, with footmen after him, 
and Vizard meanwhile indicating him to 
Standard as "the joy of the playhouse 
and the life of the park, Sir Harry Wild- 
air, newly come from Paris " ; The Twin 
Rivals opens in a volley of epigrams ; 
the rise of the curtain in The Beaux' 



"63 



Stratagein discloses sly old Boniface and 
the ingenious Cherry calling and run- 
ning, running and calling, in a fluster 
pregnant of farce and revel. Farquhar's 
pages are not for the closet ; they have 
little passive charm ; to quote from them, 
full as they are of familiar saws almost 
all his own, is hardly fair. His mother- 
wit arises from the ludicrous and unfore- 
seen predicament, not from vanity and 
conscious power ; it is integral, not mere 
repartee ; and it never calls a halt to the 
action. As was well said by Charles 
Cowden Clarke, "there are no traps for 
jests" in Farquhar; "no trains laid to 
fire equivoque!' The clear fun, spurt- 
ing unannounced in dialogue after di- 
alogue, in incident after incident ; the 
incessant Moliere-like masquerades; the 
thousand little issues depending upon 
by -play and transient inspiration; the 
narrowing scope and deepening senti- 
ment of the plot, like a secret given to 
the players, to be told fully only to the 
audience most in touch with them — these 
commend Farquhar's vivacious roles to 
actors, and make them both difficult 



[64 



and desirable. With what unction, from 
an actor's lips, falls his manifold and 
glowing praise of theatres I What a pret- 
ty picture, a broad wash of rose - purple 
and white, he can make of the interior 
seen from the wings ! " There's such a 
hurry of pleasure to transport us ; the 
bustle, noise, gallantry, equipage, garters, 
feathers, wigs, bows, smiles, ogles, love, 
music, and applause !" And again, in 
another mood : " The playhouse is the 
element of poetry, because the region of 
beauty ; the ladies, methinks, have a more 
inspiring, triumphant air in the boxes 
than anywhere else. They sit command- 
ing on their thrones, with all their sub- 
ject slaves about them ; their best clothes, 
best looks ; shining jewels, sparkling eyes ; 
the treasures of the world in a ring." 
And Mirabel, who is speaking, ends with 
an ecstatic sigh : ** I could wish that my 
whole life long were the first night of a 
new play !" 

This is a drop, or a rise, from Congreve 
and his aristocratic abstractions. Far- 
quhar, in his youth, had modelled him- 
self chiefly upon the comedy of Con- 



e65 



greve, and may be said to have perfected 
the mechanism which the genius of Con- 
greve had brought into vogue. He nev- 
er attained, nor could attain, Congreve's 
scholarly elegance of proportion and his 
consummate diction. But he had the 
happiness of being no purely literary 
dramatist; he had technical knowledge 
and skill. He brought the existing he- 
roes with their conniving valets, the 
buxom equivocal maids, the laughing, 
masking, conscienceless fine ladies, out 
of their disreputable moonlight into 
healthful comic air ; and added to them, 
in the transfer, a leaven of homely lova- 
bleness which will forever keep his mas- 
terpieces upon the stage. 

Farquhar's original intellect has a value 
only relative ; he may be considered as 
Goldsmith's tutor rather than as Con- 
greve's disciple. Goldsmith had no small 
knowledge of Farquhar, his forerunner by 
sixty years as a sizar student of Trinity; 
and, like him, he is reported to have been 
dropped from his class for a buffoonery. 
What friends {Arcades ainbo, in both Vir- 
gilian and blameless Byronese) might 



1 66 



these two parsons' sons have been ! Scrub, 
Squire Sullen's servant, in The Beaux 
Stratage77i, who " on Saturday draws war- 
rants, and on Sunday draws beer," was a 
part Goldy once greatly desired to act. 
He, too, when he came to write plays, 
cast about for conventional types to han- 
dle and improve. Tony and his incom- 
parable mother would hardly have been, 
without their first imperfect apparition 
in Wycherley's powerful (and stolen) 
Plain Dealer ; and Young Marlow and 
Hastings are frank reproductions of 
Archer and Aimwell, in a much finer 
situation. Miss Hardcastle hopes that in 
her cap and apron she may resemble 
Cherry. And no one seems to have 
traced a celebrated passage in The Vicar 
of Wakefield €\XS\^x to my Lady Howdye's 
message to my Lady Allnight repeated 
by Archer (who in this same scene in- 
troduces the ** topical song " upon the 
modern boards), or else to the example 
of the manoeuvring Bisarre in Act H., 
Scene L, of The Inconstant, Surely, 
*' forms which proceed from simple 
enumeration and are exposed to validity 



i67 



from a contradictory instance " supplies 
the unique original of the nonsense- 
rhetoric which so confounded poor Mo- 
ses.* The talk of Clincher Junior and 
Tim, of Kite, Bullock, Scrub, Lyric, and 
the unbaptized wench Parly, of the con- 
stable showing the big bed to Hermes 
Wouldbe, the talk, that is, of Farquhar's 
common people, shows humor altogeth- 
er of what we may call the Goldsmith 
order : genial, odd, grotesque paradox, 
springing from Irish inconsequence and 
love of human kind. 

In the sixth year of Queen Anne, when 
Farquhar died, Steele was married to his 
" Prue," and having seen the last of his 
three reformatory dramas " damned for 
its piety," sought Joseph Addison's ap- 
proval and collaboration, and fell to de- 
signing The Tatler. Fielding was new- 
born, Johnson just out of the cradle, 



* The Vicar of Wakefield dates from 1766. Almost 
twenty years before that, the immortal Partridge had re- 
marked to Tom Jones, quoting his schoolmaster: " Polly 
matete cry town is my daskalon." Noble nonsense hath 
her pedigree. Goldsmith, however, is not so likely to 
have taken his cue from Fielding. 



i68 



Pope was trying a cunning young hand 
at his first Pastorals ; Defoe, an alumnus 
of Newgate, was beating his way outward 
and upward ; Swift, yet a Whig, was known 
but for his Tale of a Tub. The fresh wa- 
ters were rising on all sides to vivify the 
sick lowlands of the decadence. The 
kingdoms had a forgotten lesson, and 
long in the learning, set before them : 
to regain, as a basis for legitimate re- 
sults, their mental independence and sim- 
plicity ; to serve art for art's sake, and to 
achieve, through the reactionary formal- 
ism of the nascent eighteenth century, 
freedom and a broad ethic outlook. It 
was as if Comedy, in her winning mere- 
tricious perfections, had to die, that Eng- 
lish prose might live. It is enough for 
an immature genius of the third order, 
born under Charles the Second, to have 
vaguely foreshadowed a just and imper- 
ative change. Farquhar certainly does 
foreshadow it, albeit with what theologi- 
ans might call absence of the necessary 
intention. 

He wrote excellent prefaces and pro- 
logues. His Discourse upon Comedy, in 



[69 



the Miscellanies, did pioneer work for his 
theory, since expounded by more author- 
itative critics, and received by the Eng- 
Hsh world, that the observance or non- 
observance of the dramatic unities is at 
the will of the wise, and that for guid- 
ance in all such matters playwrights 
should look to Shakespeare rather than 
to Aristotle. The Discoursey in Far- 
quhar's clear, sunny, homespun, forceful 
style, does him honor, and should be re- 
printed. His best charm is that he can- 
not be didactic. His suasion is of the 
strongest, but he has the self-conscious- 
ness of all sensitive and analytic minds, 
which keeps him free here as elsewhere 
from the slightest assumption of despot- 
ism. It is very refreshing, in the face of 
that incessant belaboring of the reader 
which Lesage was setting as a contem- 
poraneous fashion, to come across Far- 
quhar's gentle good-humored salutatory : 
" If you like the author's book, you have 
all the sense he thought you had ; if you 
dislike it, you have more sense than he 
was aware of!" Had he lived longer, or 
a little later, we should have found him 



T70 



as well, with his turn for skirmishing 
psychology, among the essayists and the 
novelists. There were in him a mellow- 
ness and an unction which have their full- 
est play in professedly subjective writing. 
Farquhar, after all, did not fulfil himself, 
for he followed an ill outgoing fashion 
in aesthetics rather than further a right 
incoming one. No one can help be- 
grudging him to the period he adorned. 
He deserved to flourish on the manlier 
morrow, and to hold a historic position 
with the regenerators of public taste in 
England. " Ah, go hang thyself up, my 
brave Crillon, for at Arques we had a 
fight, and thou wert NOT in it !" One 
can fancy Sir Richard Steele forever 
quoting that at Captain George Far- 
quhar, in some roomy club - window in 
Paradise. 



IV 

TOPHAM BEAUCLERK 

1739- 1780 

AND 

BENNET LANGTON 

1741-1800 




TOPHAM BEAUCLERK AND 
BENNET LANGTON 

N Samuel Johnson's famous 
circle nearly every man 
stands for himself, full of 
definite purpose and power. 
But two young men are 
there who did nothing of moment, whose 
names chime often down the pages of all 
his biographies, and to whom the world 
must pay honor, if only for the friendship 
they took and gave. As Apollo should 
be set about with his Graces "tripping 
neatly," so the portentous old apparition 
of Johnson seems never so complete and 
endearing as when attended by these 
two above all things else Johnsonians. 
When the Turk's Head is ajar in Gerrard 
Street, in shadow- London; when the 
**unclubable " Hawkins strides over the 
threshold, and Hogarth goes by the win- 



174 



dow with his large nod and smile ; when 
Chamier is there reading, Goldsmith pos- 
ing in purple silk small-clothes, Sir Joshua 
fingering his trumpet, Burke and little 
brisk Garrick stirring ** bishop"* in their 
glasses, and the king of the hour, distin- 
guished by his lack of ruflfles, is rolling 
about in his chair of state, saying some- 
thing prodigiously humorous and wise, 
it is still Bennet Langton and Topham 
Beauclerk who most give the scene its 
human genial lustre, standing with laugh- 
ter behind him, arm in arm. They were 
his favorites, and it is the most adorable 
thing about them both that they made 
out to like James Boswell, who was jeal- 
ous of them. (Perhaps they had appre- 
hended thoroughly Newman's fine apho- 
rism concerning a bore: "You may yield, 
or you may flee : you cannot conquer !") 
The rare glimpses we have of their broth- 
erly lives is through the door which opens 
or shuts for Johnson. Between him and 
them was deep and enduring affection, 



* A popular eighteenth century beverage, composed of 
wine, orange, and sugar. 



175 



and what little is known of them has a 
right to be more, for his sake. 

Bennet Langton, born in 1741 in the 
very neighborhood famous now as the 
birthplace of Tennyson, was the elder son 
of the odd and long -descended George 
Langton of Langton, and of Diana his 
wife, daughter of Edmund Turnor, Es- 
quire, of Stoke Rochford, Lincolnshire. 
While a lad in the fen-country, he read 
The Rainblery and conceived the purest 
enthusiasm for its author. He came to 
London, indeed, on the ideal errand of 
seeking him out, and, thanks to the kind 
apothecary Levett, found the idol of his 
imagination at home at No. 17 Gough 
Square, Fleet Street. Despite the some- 
what staggering circumstances of John- 
son's attire, — for the serious boy had 
rashly presupposed a stately, fastidious, 
and well-mannered figure, — he paid his 
vows, and commended himself to his 
new friend for once and all. Langton 
entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1757, 
at the age of sixteen.* The Doctor, who 

* Although Langton is recorded on his college books 
as having given the usual £,io for plate, and also as 



had known him about three years, fol- 
lowed his career at the university with 
interest, writing to Langton's tutor, then 
" dear Tom Warton," just appointed to 
the professorship of poetry held by his 
father, and afterwards poet-laureate : " I 
see your pupil : his mind is as exalted 
as his stature," and to Langton's self the 
sweet generality : *' I love, dear sir, to 
think of you." He even paid his Fresh- 
man a visit, and swam sportively across 
a dangerous pool in the Isis, in the teeth 
of his warning; and here also, in the Ox- 
ford which was long ago his own " tent 
of a night," he fell across a part of his 
destiny in the shape of that strange 
bird, Mr. Topham Beauclerk, then a tak- 
ing scapegrace of eighteen. The Doctor 
must have shaken his head at first, and 
'wondered at the juxtaposition of this 
arrant Lord of Misrule and the " evan- 



having paid his caution money in 1757, his name is 
not down upon the matriculation lists, possibly because 
he failed to appear at the moment the entries were being 
made. In what must have been his destined space upon 
one of the pages, Dr. Ingram made this note : " Q. Num 
Bennet Langton hie inserendus ?" 



177 



gelical goodness " of his admirable Lang- 
ton, until mollified by the knowledge 
that a species of cult for himself; and 
ardent perusal of his writings, had first 
brought them together. It was a pleas- 
ant thought to him, that of the two young 
ribboned heads high in the quadrangle, 
bending for the ninth time over The 
Reasons Why Advice is Generally Inef- 
fectual, The Mischief of Unboicnded Rail- 
lery, and the jolly satire on Screech-Owls ; 
or smiling over the shy Verecundulus 
and the too-celebrated Misellus who were 
part of the author's machinery for add- 
ing ** Christian ardor to virtue, and Chris- 
tian confidence to truth." 

Beauclerk, like Langton, was a critic 
and a student ; he was well-bred, urbane, 
and of excellent natural parts ; moreover, 
he was a wit, one of the very foremost of 
his day, when wits grew in every garden. 
An only child, he was born in London in 
the December of 1739, and named after 
that benevolent Topham of Windsor who 
left the manors of Clewer Brocas and 
Didworth and a collection of paintings 
and drawings to his father, the handsome 



178 



wild Lord Sydney Beauclerk, fifth son of 
the first Duke of St. Albans, and also, 
in his time, a gentleman commoner of 
Trinity. Lord Sydney died early, in the 
autumn of 1744, and was buried in West- 
minster Abbey with his hero-brother Au- 
brey, whose epitaph, still to be read there, 
Thomson seems to have written. All the 
pretty toys and curios passed to Top- 
ham the little boy, under the guardian- 
ship of Lady Beauclerk, his excellent 
but literal mother, once Mary Norris of 
Speke in Lancashire. His tutor was 
named Parker, and must have been a 
much-enduring man. Young Beauclerk 
grew up, bearing a resemblance in many 
ways to Charles IL ; and so it befell 
that with his aggravating flippancy, his 
sharp sense, his quiver full of gibes, his 
time-wasting, money-wasting moods, for- 
eign as Satan and his pomps to those of 
his sweet-natured college companion, he 
was able to strike Dr. Johnson in his 
own political weak spot. A flash of the 
liquid Stuart eye was enough to disarm 
Johnson at the very moment when he 
was calling up his most austere frown ; 



179 



it was enough to turn the vinegar of his 
wrath to the honey of kindness. // ne 
nous reste quu7ie chose a faire : embras- 
sons-nous I as the wheedling Prince, at a 
crisis, says to Henry Esmond. Johnson, 
as everybody knows, was a Jacobite. No 
sincerer testimony could he have given to 
his inexplicable liking for a royal rogue 
than that he allowed Nell Gwynn's great- 
grandson to tease him and tyrannize over 
him during an entire lifetime. A choice 
spectacle this : Mr. Topham Beauclerk, 
on his introduction, literally bewitching 
Dr. Samuel Johnson ! The stolid moral- 
ist was enraptured with his Jack-o'-lantern 
antics; he rejoiced in his manners, his 
taste and literary learning; admired him 
indiscreetly, rich clothes, equipage, and 
all ; followed his whims meekly, expostu- 
lated with him almost against his traitor- 
ous impulses, and clung to him to the end 
in unbroken fondness and faith. 

Beauclerk had immense gayety and 
grace, and the full force given by high 
spirits. His accurate, ever- widening 
knowledge of books and men, his con- 
summate culture, and his fearlessness, sat 



i8o 



handsomely on one who was regarded by- 
contemporary old ladies as a mere *' mac- 
aroni." It was a matter of course that he 
tried for no degree at college. The mis- 
tress of Streatham Park, who was by no 
means his adorer, and who remembered 
his chief wickedness in remembering that 
** he wished to be accounted wicked," in- 
forms us in a private jotting since pub- 
lished that he was ** a man of very strict 
veracity." A philosopher and a truth- 
teller, whatever his worldly weaknesses, 
was sure to be a character within the 
range of Johnson's affections. It was he 
who most troubled the good Doctor, he 
for whom he suffered in silence, with 
whom he wrangled ; he whose insupera- 
ble taunting promise, never reaching any 
special development, vexed and disheart- 
ened him ; yet, perhaps because of these 
very things, though Bennet Langton was 
infinitely more to his mind, it was Ab- 
salom, once again, whom the old father- 
ly heart loved best. Nor was he unre- 
paid. None loved him better, in return, 
than his " Beau," the very mirror of the 
name, who was wont to pick his way up 



the grimy Fleet Street courts " with ven- 
eration," as Boswell records. 

Bennet Langton, as Mr. Forster express- 
es it in his noble Life of Goldsmith, was 
" an eminent example of the high and hu- 
mane class who are content to * ring the 
bell ' to their friends." He was a mild 
young visionary, scrupulous, tolerant, and 
generous in the extreme ; modest, con- 
templative, averse to dissipation ; a per- 
fect talker and reader, and a perfect lis- 
tener ; with a face sweet as a child's, 
fading but now, among his kindred, on 
the canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He 
left a gracious memory behind at Oxford, 
where his musing bust adorns the old 
monastic library of Trinity. He was six 
feet six inches tall, slenderly built, and 
slightly stooping. *' The ladies got about 
him in drawing-rooms," said Edmund 
Burke, "like maids about the Maypole!" 

Miss Hawkins, in her Memoirs, names 
him as the person with whom Johnson 
was certainly seen to the fairest advan- 
tage. His deferent suave manner was 
the best foil possible to the Doctor's ex- 
traordinary explosions. He had supreme 



self-command ; no one ever saw him an- 
gry ; and in most matters of life, as a 
genuine contrast to his beloved friend 
Beauclerk, he was apt to take things a 
shade too seriously. We learn from Mr. 
Henry Best, author of some good Per- 
sonal and Literary Memorials, that the 
advance rumors of the French Revolu- 
tion found Langton, in the fullest sense, 
an aristocrat ; but it was not long before 
he became, from conviction, a thorough 
Liberal, and so remained, although he 
suffered a great unpopularity, owing to 
this change, in his native county. He 
wrote, in 1760, a little book of essays 
entitled Rustics, which never got beyond 
the passivity of manuscript. The year 
before, under the date of July 28th, 
Langton contributed to the pages of 
The Idler the paper numbered 67 and 
entitled A Scholar s Journal. It is a 
pleasant study of procrastination and of 
shifting plans, a gentle bit of humor to 
be ranked as autobiographic. There is 
an indorsement of Montrose in its heroic 
advice to '* risk the certainty of little for 
the chance of much." But Langton's 



83 



graceful academic pen was not destined 
to a public career. Perseverance of any 
sort was not native to him. He fulfilled 
beautifully, adds the vivacious Miss Haw- 
kins, ** the pious injunction of Sir Thomas 
Browne, * to sit quietly in the soft show- 
ers of Providence,' and might, without in- 
justice, be characterized as utterly unfit 
for every species of activity." Yet at 
the call of duty, so well was the natural 
man dominated by his unclouded will, 
he girded himself to any exertion. Wine- 
drinking was habitual with him, and he 
felt its need to sharpen and rouse his in- 
tellect ; '* but the idea of Bennet Lang- 
ton being what is called * overtaken,' " 
wrote the same associate whom we have 
been quoting, " is too preposterous to be 
dwelt on." She furnishes one illustra- 
tion of Langton's Greek serenity. Talk- 
ing to a company, of a chilly forenoon, 
in his own house, he paused to remark 
that if the fire lacked attention it might 
go out : a brief, casual, murmurous in- 
terruption. He resumed his discourse, 
breaking off presently, and pleading ab- 
stractedly with eye in air : " Pray ring 



1 84 



for coals !" All sat looking at the fire, 
and so little solicitous about the impend- 
ing catastrophe that presently Langton 
was off again on the stream of his soft- 
ened eloquence. In a few minutes came 
another lull. " Did anybody answer that 
bell ?" A general negative. " Did any- 
body ring that bell ?" A sly shaking 
of heads. And once more the inspired 
monody soared among the clouds, at 
last dropping meditatively to the hearth- 
stone : '* Dear, dear, the fire is out !" 

Langton was the centre of a group, 
wherever he happened to be, talking de- 
lightfully, and twirling the oblong gold- 
mounted snuff - box, which promptly 
appeared as sociabilities began : a con- 
spicuous figure, with his height, his cour- 
teous smile, his mild beauty, and his hab- 
it of crossing his arms over his breast, 
or locking his hands together on his 
knee. He was a great rider, and could 
run like a hound. He had a queerness of 
constitution which seemed to leave him 
at his lowest ebb every afternoon about 
two of the clock, forgetful, weary, con- 
fused, and without an idea in his head ; 



i85 



but after a little food, he was himself 
again. At dinner-parties he usually rose 
fasting, " such wa^s the perpetual flow of 
his conversation, and such the incessant 
claim made upon him." A morning call 
from Mr. Langton was a thing to suggest 
the eternal years ; yet we are told that 
satiety dwelt not where he was ; like 
Cowley, " he never oppressed any man's 
parts, or put any man out of counte- 
nance." He had much the same sense 
of humor as Beauclerk had, and his 
speech was quite as full of good sense 
and direct observation, if not as cutting. 
He indicted a fault of Edmund Burke's 
in one extreme stroke: "Burke whisks 
the end of his tail in the face of an 
arguer!" Johnson, the arch-whisker of 
tails, was not to be brought to book ; 
but Burke's greatness was of a texture to 
bear and enjoy the thrust. It is curi- 
ous that Langton was markedly fond of 
Hudibras ; such a relish indicates, per- 
haps, the turn his own wit might have 
taken, had it not been held in by too 
much second thought. 
Johnson was wont to announce that he 



[86 



valued Langton for his piety, his ancient 
descent, his amiable behavior, and his 
mastery of Greek. "Who in this town 
knows anything of Clenardus, sir, but 
you and I ?" he would say. In the midst 
of his talk Langton would fall into the 
**vowelled undertone" of the tongue he 
loved, correcting himself with a little 
wave of the hands, and the apologetic 
phrase: **And so it goes on." "Steeped 
to the lips in Greek " he was indeed, 
bursting out with a joyous salute to the 
moon of Hellas, upon a friend's door- 
step, or making grotesque Hellene puns, 
for his own delight,* upon the blank leaves 
of a pocket - book. Every one familiar 
with Johnsoniana will recall the charm- 
ing and spirited retort written by Dr. 
Barnard, then Dean of Derry, later, Bishop 
of Killaloe, which closes : 

** If I have thoughts and can't express 'em, 
Gibbon shall teach me how to dress 'em 

In terms select and terse; 
Jones teach me modesty and Greek ; 
Smith, how to think ; Burke, how to speak ; 

And Beauclerk, to converse!" 

* A boyish fashion of self-entertainment afterwards in 
great favor with Shelley. 



i87 



In all deference to the illustrious Sir 
William Jones, it may be claimed that 
" modesty and Greek " were the very 
arts in which Langton was a past -mas- 
ter. But he was an amateur, and a 
private scholar, and his name was a 
dissyllable ; else the Dean might have 
tossed at his feet as pretty a compli- 
ment as that given in the last line to 
his colleague. It must have gratified 
Johnson that Langton refused, at Rey- 
nolds's dinner-table, ''like a sturdy schol- 
ar," to sign the famous Round Robin 
(not signed, either, by Beauclerk) which 
besought him to ''disgrace the walls of 
Westminster with an English inscrip- 
tion." And as if to keep Langton firmly 
of his own mind on the subject, it was to 
him the Doctor confided the Greek qua- 
train, sad and proud, which he had dedi- 
cated to Goldsmith's * memory. 

For Bennet Langton Johnson had no 

* It is a pleasant thing to remember that it was Lang- 
ton, always an appreciator of Goldsmith's lovable genius, 
who suggested " Auburn " as the name for his Deserted 
Village. There is a hamlet called Auborne in Lincoln- 
shire. 



i88 



criticism but praise. He presented him 
with pride to Young and to Richardson, 
described him handsomely to Hannah 
More, and proceeded to draw his char- 
acter for Miss Reynolds, ere she had met 
him, with such ** energy and fond de- 
light " as she avowed she never could 
forget. What fine ringing metal was 
Johnson's commendation ! ** He is one 
of those to whom Nature has not spread 
her volumes, nor uttered her voices, in 
vain." *' Earth does not bear a worthier 
gentleman." "I know not who will go 
to Heaven if Langton does not." And 
in the sweetest and completest approval 
ever put by one mortal upon another: 
" Sil anima niea cudi Langtono /" Yet 
even with this '* angel of a man " the Doc- 
tor had one serious and ludicrous quarrel. 
It was the fatal outcome of his uneven 
moods that he must needs be disen- 
chanted at times even with his best beads- 
men : there came days when he would 
deny Beauclerk's good-humor to be any- 
thing but "■ acid," Langton's anything but 
** muddy." He considered it the sole 
grave fault of the latter that he was too 



i89 



ready to introduce a religious discussion 
into a mixed assembly, where he knew 
scarcely any two of the company would 
be of the same mind. On Boswell's sug- 
gestion that this may have been done for 
the sake of instructing himself, Johnson 
replied angrily that a man had no more 
right to take that means of gaining in- 
formation than he had to pit two persons 
against each other in a duel for the sake 
of learning the art of self-defence. Some 
indiscretion of this sort on Langton's 
part seems to have alienated the friends 
for the first and last time. It was during 
their transient bitterness that the Doctor 
made the historic apology, across the 
table, to Oliver Goldsmith ; an incident 
which, however beautiful in itself, was a 
hard back-handed hit at Langton, stand- 
ing by. Croker's conjecture may be true 
that the business which threatened to 
break a fealty of some sixteen years' stand- 
ing arose rather from Langton's settling 
his estate by will upon his sisters, whose 
tutor he had been. On hearing of it, the 
Great Cham grumbled and fumed, polite- 
ly applying to the Misses Langton the 



go 



title of "three dowdies!"* and shouting, 
in a feudal warmth, that ** an ancient es- 
tate, sir ! an ancient estate should always 
go to males." In fact, the Doctor be- 
haved very badly, very sardonically, and 
was pleased to lay hold of a post by Tem- 
ple Bar one night, and roar aloud over a 
piece of possible folly up in Lincolnshire 
which concerned him not in the least. 
But in due time the breach, whatever its 
cause, was healed. The Doctor, in writ- 
ing of it, uses one of his balancing sen- 
tences: ** Langton is a worthy fellow, 
without malice, though not without re- 
sentment." The two could not keep 
apart very long, despite all the unreason 
in the world. " Johnson's quarrels," Mr. 
Forster tells us, '* were lovers' quarrels." 
Another memorable passage -at- arms, 
rich in comedy, happened in the course 
of one of Johnson's sicknesses, when, in 



* Langton's sisters are generally spoken of as three in 
number. But Burke's History of the Landed Gentry 
mentions but two, Diana and Juliet. There was a young- 
er brother, Feme, who died in boyhood, and the floral 
name, not unlike a girl's, may have been responsible for 
the confusion. 



igi 



the cloistral silence of his chamber, he 
solemnly implored Bennet Langton, al- 
ways the companion who comforted his 
sunless hours, to tell him wherein his 
life had been faulty. His shy and saga- 
cious monitor wrote down, as accusation 
enough, various Scriptural texts recom- 
mending tolerance, humility, long-suffer- 
ing, and other meek ingredients which 
were not predominant in the sinner's so- 
cial composition. The penitent earnest- 
ly thanked Langton on taking the paper 
from his hand, but presently turned his 
short-sighted eyes upon him from the 
pillow, and emerging from what his own 
verbology would call a " frigorific torpor," 
he exclaimed in a loud, wrathful, suspi- 
cious tone: "What's your drift, sir.>" 
"And when I questioned him," so John- 
son afterwards told his blustering tale — 
" when I questioned him as to what oc- 
casion I had given him for such animad- 
version, all that he could say amounted 
to this : that I sometimes contradicted 
people in conversation ! Now, what 
harm does it do any man to be contra^ 
dieted?" To this same paternal young 



192 



Langton the rebel submitted his Latin 
verses ; the Poemata, in the shape in 
which we possess them, were rigorously- 
edited by him. And Johnson leaned upon 
him in more intimate ways, as he could 
never lean upon Beauclerk. To the scru- 
pulous nature instinctively right he made 
comfortable confidences : ** Men of harder 
minds than ours will do many things 
from which you and I would shrink ; yet, 
sir, they will, perhaps, do' more good in 
life than we." 

As to the Honorable Topham Beau- 
clerk, more volatile than Langton, he had 
as steady a "sunshine of cheerfulness" 
for his heritage. We find him complain- 
ing to a friend in the July of 1773 : " Ev- 
ery hour adds to my misanthropy ; and I 
have had a pretty considerable share of 
it for some years past." This incursion 
of low spirits was not normal with him. 
Johnson, bewailing his own morbid hab- 
its of mind, once said: "Some men, and 
very thinking men, too, have not these 
vexing thoughts. Sir Joshua Reynolds 
is the same all the year round ; Beau- 
clerk, when not ill and in pain, is the 



193 



same." Boswell attests that Beauclerk 
took more liberties with Johnson than 
durst any man alive, and that Johnson 
was more disposed to envy Beauclerk's 
talents than those of any one he had 
ever known. Born into the freedom of 
London, Beauclerk was familiar with Fox, 
Selwyn, and Walpole, and with the St. 
James men who did not ache to consort 
with Johnson ; and he was quite their 
match in ease and astuteness. He walked 
the modish world, where Langton could 
not and would not follow ; he alternated 
the Ship Tavern and the gaming-table 
with the court levees ; Davies's shop with 
the golden insipidities of the drawing- 
room ; la comedie, la danse, Vainoiir nihne, 
with the intellectual tie-wigs of Soho. 
It shows something of his spirit that 
whereas no member of the Club save 
himself was a frequenter of White's and 
Betty's,* or a chosen guest at Strawberry 
Hill, yet there was no person of fashion 
whom he was not proud to make known 
to Doctor Johnson, whenever he judged 

* The fruiterer. 
13 



194 



the candidate for so genuine an honor 
worthy of it. Some of these encoun- 
ters must have been queer and memora- 
ble ! 

Beauclerk's unresting sarcasm often 
flattened out Boswell and irritated the 
Doctor, though Bennet Langton, in his 
abandonments of enthusiastic optimism, 
was never more than grazed. It is not 
to be denied that this spoiled child of 
the Club liked to worry Goldsmith, the 
maladroit great man who might have 
quoted often on such occasions the sad 
gibe of Hamlet : 

" I'll be your foil, Laertes : in mine ignorance 
Your skill shall, like a star in the darkest night, 
Stick fiery off indeed." 

What a pity that Goldsmith's Retaliation 
was never finished, so as to include his 
portrait of Beau ! He was ** a pesti- 
lent wit," as Anthony a Wood calls Mar- 
veil. Johnson, shy creature ! deplored 
Beauclerk's ** predominance over his 
Gompany." The tyranny> however, was 
gracefully and decorously exercised, if 
we are to believe the unique eulogy that 



195 



"no man was ever freer, when he was 
about to say a good thing, from a look 
which expressed that it was coming; nor, 
when he had said it, from a look which 
expressed that it had come." Few hu- 
man beings have had a finer sense of fun 
than Topham Beauclerk. He had an in- 
fallible eye for the values of blunders, 
and an incongruity came home to him 
like a blessing from above. Life with 
him was a night-watch for diverting ob- 
jects and ideas. When he was not study- 
ing, he was disporting himself, like the 
wits of the Restoration ; and he was 
equal to all emergencies, as they suc- 
ceeded one another. Every specimen 
preserved of his talk is perfect of its 
kind, and makes us long for a full index. 
Pointed his speech was, always, and re- 
minds one indeed of a foil, but without 
the button ; a dangerous little weapon, 
somewhat unfair, but carried with such 
consummate flourish that those whom it 
pricks could almost cheer it. " O Lord ! 
how I did hate that horrid Beauclerk !'* 
Mrs. Piozzi scribbled once on the margin 
of Wraxall's Memoirs, in an exquisite 



196 



feminine vindication of poor Beau's ac- 
complished tongue. 

He was no disguiser of his own Hkes 
and dislikes. Politics he avoided as 
much as possible ; but he affected less 
concern in public matters than he real- 
ly felt. " Consecrate that time to your 
friends," he writes with mock severity to 
the ideal Irishman, Lord Charlemont, 
** which you spend in endeavoring to 
promote the interests of a half- million 
of scoundrels." For his private business 
he had least zeal of all ; and cites " my 
own confounded affairs " as the cause of 
his going into Lancashire. Beauclerk 
had great tact, boldness, and indepen- 
dence ; his natural scorn of an oppressor 
was his modern and democratic quality. 
His idleness (for he was as idle by habit 
as Langton w^as by nature) he recog- 
nized, and lightly deprecated. Fastidious 
in everything, he made '* one hour of con- 
versation at Elmsley's"* his standard of 
enjoyment, and his imagined extreme of 
annoyance was " to be clapped on the 

* The bookseller's. 



:97 



back by Tom Davies." What he chose 
to call his leisure (again the ancestral 
Stuart trait!) he dedicated to the natural 
sciences in his beloved laboratory. *' I 
see Mr. Beauclerk often, both in town 
and country," wrote Goldsmith to Ben- 
net Langton ; *'he is now going directly 
forward to become a second Boyle, deep 
in chemistry and physics." When there 
was some fanciful talk of setting up the 
Club as a college, "to draw a wonderful 
concourse of students," Beauclerk, by 
unanimous vote, was elected to the pro- 
fessorship of Natural Philosophy. 

Johnson's influence on him, potent 
though it was, seems to have been nega- 
tive enough. It kept him from a few 
questionable things, and preserved in him 
an outward decorum towards customs 
and established institutions ; but it failed 
to incite him to make of his manifold 
talents the " illustrious figure " which 
Langton 's eyes discerned in a vain an- 
ticipation. Beauclerk and the great 
High Churchman went about much to- 
gether, and had amusing experiences. 
On such occasions, as in all their famil- 



1 98 



iar intercourse, the disciple had the true 
salt of the Doctor's talk, which, as Haz- 
litt remarks, was often something quite 
unlike "the cumbrous cargo of words" 
he kept for professional use. In the late 
winter of 1765 the two visited Cam- 
bridge, Beauclerk having a mind to call 
upon a friend at Trinity. 

These, as we know, had their many 
differences, *' like a Spanish great galleon, 
and an English man -o'- war"; the one 
smooth, sharp, and civil, the other indig- 
nantly dealing with the butt-end of per- 
sonality. Boswell gives a long account 
of a charming dispute concerning the 
murderer of Miss Reay, and the evidence 
of his having carried two pistols. Beau- 
clerk was right ; but Johnson, with quite 
as solid a sense of virtue, was angry ; and 
he was soothed at the end only by an 
adroit and affectionate reply. " Sir," 
the Doctor began, sternly, at another 
time, after listening to some mischievous 
waggery, "you never open your mouth 
but with the intention to give pain, and 
you often give me pain, not from the 
power of what you say, but from seeing 



199 



your intention." And again, he said to 
him whom he had compared to Alexan- 
der, marching in triumph into Babylon : 
*' You have, sir ! a love of folly, and a 
scorn of fools ; everything you do attests 
the one, and everything you say the oth- 
er."* Beauclerk could also lecture his 
mentor. It was his steadfast counsel 
that the Doctor should devote himself 
to poetry, and draw in his horns of dog- 
ma and didactics. 

He had, ever ready, some quaint simile 
or odd application from the classics; in 
the habit of " talking from books," as the 
Doctor called it, he was, however, dis- 
tanced by Langton. Referring to that 
friend's habit of sitting or standing against 
the fireplace, with one long leg twisted 
about the other, " as if fearing to occupy 
too much space," Beauclerk likened him, 
for all the world, to the stork in Raphael's 
cartoon of The Miraculous Draught. f 
One of Beauclerk's happiest hits, and cer- 

* Rochester, in his immortal epigram, had said the 
same of King Charles II. 

t This neat descriptive stroke has been attributed also 
to Richard Paget. 



tainly his boldest, was made while John- 
son was being congratulated upon his 
pension. " How much now it was to be 
hoped," whispered the young blood, in 
reference to Falstaff's celebrated vow, 
"that he would purge and live cleanly, as 
a gentleman should do !" Johnson seems 
to have taken the hint in good - humor, 
and actually to have profited by it. 

Very soon after leaving Oxford, Beau- 
clerk became engaged to a Miss Dray- 
cott, whose family were well known to 
that affable blue-stocking, Mrs. Monta- 
gu ; but some coldness on his part, some 
sensitiveness on hers, broke off the 
match. His fortune - hunting parent is 
said to have been disappointed, as the 
lady owned several lead -mines in her 
own right. That same year, with Ben- 
net Langton for companion part of the 
way, Beauclerk, whose health, never ro- 
bust, now began to give him anxiety, 
set out on a Continental tour. Baretti, 
whom he had met at home, received him 
most kindly at Milan, thanks to Johnson's 
urgent and friendly letter. By his sub- 
sequent knowledge of Italian popular cus- 



toms, he was able to testify in Baret- 
ti's favor, when the latter was under ar- 
rest for killing his man in the Haymarket, 
and in concert with Burke, Garrick, Gold- 
smith, and Johnson, to help him, in a very 
interesting case, towards his acquittal. 
It was reported to Selwyn that the 
handsome gambling Inglese was robbed 
at Venice of ;£io,ooo! an incident which, 
perhaps, shortened his peregrinations. 
If the report were accurate, it would 
prove that he could have been in no 
immediate need of pecuniary rescue 
from his leaden sweetheart. It was 
Dr. Johnson's opinion, coinciding with 
the opinion of Roger Ascham on the 
same general subject, that travel adds 
very little to one's mental forces, and 
that Beauclerk might have learned 
more in the Academe of " Fleet Street, 
sir!" 

Topham Beauclerk married Lady Di- 
ana Spencer, the eldest daughter of the 
second Duke of Marlborough, as soon as 
she obtained a divorce from her first 
husband. This was Frederick, Lord Bol- 
ingbroke, nephew and heir of the great 



owner of that title ; a very trying gen- 
tleman, who was the restless " Bully" of 
Selwyn's correspondence ; he survived 
until 1787. The ceremony took place 
March 12, 1768, in St. George's, Han- 
over Square, **by license of the Arch- 
•bishop of Canterbury," both conspira- 
tors being then residents of the parish. 
Lady Diana Spencer was born in the 
spring of 1734, and was therefore in her 
thirty-fifth year, while Beauclerk was but 
twenty- nine.* Johnson was disturbed, 
and felt offended at first with the whole 
affair ; but he never withdrew from the 
agreeable society of Beauclerk's wife. It 
is nothing wonderful that the court- 
ship and honey -moon was signalized 
by the forfeit of Beauclerk's place in 
the exacting Club, " for continued inat- 
tendance," and not regained for a con- 
siderable period. '* They are in town, 

* The register of St. George's betrays a little eager 
blunder of Lady Di's which is amusing. When the offi- 
ciating curate asked her to sign, she wrote " Diana Beau- 
clerk," and was obliged to cross out the signature — one 
knows with what a smile and a flush ! — and substitute the 
"Diana Spencer" which stands beside it. 



203 



at Topham's house, and give dinners," 
one of George Selwyn's gossiping friends 
wrote, after the wedding. " Lord An- 
cram dined there yesterday, and called 
her nothing but Lady Bolingbroke the 
whole time!" Let us hope that ''Mi- 
lady Bully" triumphed over her awk- 
ward guest, and looked, as Earl March 
once described her under other difficul- 
ties, *' handsomer than ever I saw her, and 
not the least abashed ;" or as deliberately 
easy as when she entertained with her 
gay talk the nervous Boswell who awaited 
the news of his election or rejection from 
the Club. She was a blond goddess, 
exceedingly fair to see. In her middle 
age she fell under the observant glance 
of delightful Fanny Burney, who did not 
fail to allow her *' pleasing remains of 
beauty." 

The divorcee was fond of and faithful 
to her new lord, and no drawback upon his 
aesthetic pride, inasmuch as she was an 
artist of no mean merit. Horace Wal- 
pole built a room for the reception of 
some of her drawings, which he called 
his Beauclerk Closet, ** not to be shown 



204 



to all the profane that come to see the 
house," and he always praised them ex- 
travagantly. It is surer critical testi- 
mony in her favor that her name figures 
yet in encyclopaedias, and that Sir Joshua, 
the honest and unbought judge, much 
admired her work, which Bartolozzi was 
kept busy engraving. It was her series 
of illustrations to Biirger's wild ballad of 
Leonora (with the dolly knight, the wood- 
en monks, the genteel heroine, and the 
vigorous spectres) which, long after, helped 
to fire the young imagination of Shelley. 
It is to be feared that her invaluable por- 
trait of Samuel Johnson is not, or never 
was, extant. "Johnson was confined for 
some days in the Isle of Skye," writes her 
rogue of a spouse, ** and we hear that he 
was obliged to swim over to the mainland, 
taking hold of a cow's tail. . . . Lady Di 
has promised to make a drawing of it." 
Sir Joshua's pretty " Una " is the little 
Elizabeth, afterwards Countess of Pem- 
broke, elder daughter of Lady Di and 
Topham Beauclerk, painted the year her 
father died. 

The family lived in princely style, 



20S 



both at their " summer quarters " at Mus- 
well Hill, and on Great Russell Street, 
where the library, set in a great gar- 
den, reached, as Walpole mischievous- 
ly gauged it, "half-way to Highgate.'* 
Lady Di, an admirable hostess, proved 
herself one of those odd and rare women 
who take to their husbands' old friends. 
Selwyn she cordially liked, and her warm- 
est welcome attended Langton, whom she 
would rally for his remissness, when he 
failed to come to them at Richmond. 
He could reach them so easily ! she said ; 
all he need do was to lay himself at 
length, his feet in London and his head 
with them, eodein die. This Richmond 
home remained her residence during her 
widowhood. Walpole mentions a Thames 
boat-race in 1791, when he sat in a tent 
"just before Lady Di's windows," and 
gazed upon " a scene that only Richmond, 
on earth, can exhibit." In the church of 
the same leafy town her body rests. 

Beauclerk died at his Great Russell 
Street house on March 11, 1780. He had 
been failing steadily under visitations of 
his old trouble since 1777, when he lay 



2C6 



sick unto death at Bath, and when his wife 
nursed him tenderly into what seemed 
to Walpole a miraculous recovery. He 
was but forty -one years old, and, for all 
his genius, left no more trace behind than 
that Persian prince who suddenly disap- 
peared in the shape of a butterfly, and 
whom old Burton calls a " light phantas- 
tick fellow." His air of boyish promise, 
quite unconsciously worn, hoodwinked his 
friends into prophecies of his fame. He 
did not give events a chance to put im- 
mortality on his " bright, unbowed, in- 
submissive head." Yet he was bitterly 
mourned. " I would walk to the extent 
of the diameter of the earth to save him," 
cried Johnson, who had loved him for 
over twenty years ; and again, to Lord 
Althorp : "This is a loss, sir, that per- 
haps the whole nation could not repair." 
Boswell mentions the Doctor's April 
stroll, at this time, while he was writing 
his Lives of the Poets ; and tells us how, 
returning from a call on the widow of 
the companion of his youth, David Gar- 
rick, he leaned over the rails of the 
Adelphi TerracC) watching the dark riv- 



207 



er, and thinking of "two such friends as 
cannot be supplied." " Poor dear Beau- 
clerk !" Johnson wrote, when his violent 
grief had somewhat subsided, ''nee, tit 
soles y dabis joca I His wit and his folly, 
his acuteness and his maliciousness, his 
merriment and his reasoning, are alike 
over. Such another will not often be 
found among mankind." Beyond this 
well-known and characteristic summing- 
up, the Doctor made no discoverable 
mention, in his correspondence, of his 
bereavement, certainly not to the highly- 
prejudiced Mrs. Thrale, to whom he wrote 
often and gayly in the year of Beauclerk's 
death. Nor shall we know how the ca- 
tastrophe affected Ben net Langton ; for 
all the most interesting papers relating 
to him were destroyed when the old Hall 
at Langton- by -Spilsby was burned in 
1855. On this subject, as on others as 
intimate, he stands, perforce, silent. 

Readers may recall a passage in Miss 
Burney's Diary which gives countenance 
to an accusation not borne out by any 
other testimony, that Beauclerk and his 
wife had not lived happily together. Din- 



2o8 



ing at Sir Joshua's at Richmond, in 1782, 
Edmund Burke, sitting next the author 
of Evelina, took occasion, on catching 
sight of Lady Di's '* pretty white house '* 
through the trees, to rejoice in the fact 
that she was well-housed, moneyed, and 
a widow. He added that he had never 
enjoyed the good-fortune of another so 
keenly as in this blessed instance. Then, 
turning to his new acquaintance, as the 
least likely to be informed of the matter, 
he spoke in his own ** strong and marked 
expressions "of the singular ill-treatment 
Beauclerk had shown his wife, and the 
" necessary relief " it must have been ^o 
her when he was called away. The state- 
ment does not seem to have been gain- 
said by any of the company ; nor was 
Burke liable to a slanderous error. So 
severe a comment on Beauclerk, resting, 
even as it does, wholly on Miss Burney's 
veracity, ought, in fairness, to be incor- 
porated into any sketch of the man. On 
the other side, it is pleasant to discover 
that Beauclerk, in his will, made five days 
before the end, bequeathed all he pos- 
sessed to his wife, and reverted to her the 



209 



estates of his children, should they die 
under age. There was but one bequest 
beyond these, and that was to Thomas 
Clarke, the faithful valet. The executors 
named were Lady Di and her brother. 
Lord Charles Spencer, who had also been 
groomsman at the marriage, which, de- 
spite Burke and its own evil beginnings, 
it is hard to think of as ill-starred. The 
joint guardians of Charles George Beau- 
clerk, the only son, were to be Bennet 
Langton and a Mr. Loyrester, whom 
Dr. Johnson speaks of as ** Leicester, 
Beauclerk's relation, and a man of good 
character;" but the guardianship, provi- 
sional in case of Lady Di's decease, never 
came into force, as she survived, in full- 
est harmony with her three children, up 
to August I, 1808, having entered her 
seventy-fifth year. Various private leg- 
acies came to Langton, by his old com- 
rade's dying wish, the most precious among 
them, perhaps, being the fine Reynolds 
portrait of Johnson, which had been paint- 
ed at Beauclerk's cost. Under it was in- 
scribed : 

" Ifigefiium ingens 
Inctdto latet hoc sub cor pore.'''' 
14 



Langton thoughtfully effaced the lines. 
** It was kind of you to take it off," said 
the burly Doctor, with a sigh ; and then 
(for how could he but recall the contrast 
of temperament in the two, as well as the 
affectionate context of Horace ?), ** not 
unkind in him to have put it on." The 
collection of thirty thousand glorious 
books '' pernobilis Angli T. Beauclerk "was 
sold at auction. The advertisement alone 
is royal reading. There is much amiable 
witness to the circumstance that Beau- 
clerk was not only an admirer but a 
buyer of his friends' works. From some 
kind busybody who attended the twenty- 
ninth day of the sale, and pencilled his 
observations upon the margins of the 
catalogue now in the British Museum, 
we learn that Goldsmith's History of the 
Earth and A^iimated Nature (nothing 
less !), which was issued, with cuts, in the 
year he died, was knocked down to the 
vulgar for two and threepence. The 
shelves, naturally, were stocked with 
Johnsons. Things dear to the bibliophile 
were there : innumerable first editions, 
black-letter, mediaeval manuscript, Elze- 



virs, priceless English and Italian classics, 
gathered with real feeling and pride ; but 
the most vivid personal interest belonged 
to the unpretending Lot 3444, otherwise 
known to fame as The Rambler, printed 
at Edinburgh in 1751 ; for that was the 
young Beauclerk's own copy, carried with 
him to Oxford, and with a fragrance, as 
of a last century garden, of the first hearty 
friendship of boys. One cannot help 
wishing that a sentimental fate left it in 
Langton's own hands. 

Lady Beauclerk, Topham's mother, 
had died in 1766; and he asked to be 
buried beside her, or at her feet, in the 
old chapel of Garston, near Liverpool : 
'* an instance of tenderness," said John- 
son, "which I should hardly have ex- 
pected." There, in the place of his choice, 
he rests, without an epitaph. 

After this the Doctor consoled him- 
self more than ever with Bennet Lang- 
ton, and with the atmosphere of love 
and reverence which surrounded him in 
Langton's house. He had been of old 
the most desired of all guests at the 
family seat in Lincolnshire. ** Langton, 



sir !" as he liked to announce, " had a 
grant of warren from Henry II.; and 
Cardinal Stephen Langton, of King John's 
reign, was of this family." Peregrine 
Langton, Rennet's uncle, was a man 
of simple and benevolent habits, who 
brought economy to a science, without 
niggardliness, and whom Johnson de- 
clared to be one of those he clung to 
at once, both by instinct and reason ; 
Bennet's father, learned, good, and un- 
affected, the prototype of his learned, 
good, and unaffected son, was, however, 
a more diverting character. He had 
sincerest esteem for Johnson, but looked 
askance on him for his liberal views, 
and suspected him, indeed, of being a 
Papist in secret ! He once offered the 
Doctor a living of some value in the 
neighborhood, with the suggestion that 
he should qualify himself for Orders : 
a chance gravely refused. Of this exem- 
plary but rather archaic squire, Johnson, 
a dissector of everything he loved, said : 
" Sir ! he is so exuberant a talker in pub- 
lic meetings that the gentlemen of his 
county are afraid of him. No business 



213 



can be done for his declamation." In 
his behalf, too, Johnson produced one of 
his most astounding words ; for having 
understood that both Mr. and Mrs. Lang- 
ton were averse to having their portraits 
taken, he observed aloud that "a super- 
stitious reluctance to sit for one's picture 
is among the anfractuosities of the hu- 
man mind." 

Bennet Langton married, on the 24th 
of May, 1770, Mary Lloyd, daughter of the 
Countess of Haddington, and widow of 
John, the eighth Earl of Rothes, the stern 
soldier in laced waistcoat and breast- 
plate beneath, painted by Sir Joshua. It 
was a common saying at the time that 
everybody was welcome to a Countess 
Dowager of Rothes; for it did so hap- 
pen that three ladies bearing that title 
were all remarried within a few years. 
Lady Rothes, although a native of Suf- 
folk, had acquired from long residence 
in Scotland the accent of that country, 
which Dr. Johnson bore with magnani- 
mously, on the consideration that it was 
not indigenous. She had a handsome 
presence, full of easy dignity, and a nat- 



214 



uralness marked enough in the heyday 
of Georgian afYectation. With a vivacity 
very different from Lady Di Beauclerk's, 
she kept herself the spring and centre 
of Langton's tranquil domestic circle : a 
more womanly woman historiographers 
cannot find. His own charm of charac- 
ter, after his marriage, slipped more 
and more into the underground channels 
of home-life, and so coursed on benefi- 
cently in silence. Their children were 
no fewer than nine,* " not a plain face 
nor faulty person among them :" the god- 
dess daughters six feet in height, and the 
three sons so like their Maypole father 
that they were able once to amuse the 
Parisians by raising their arms to let a 
crowd pass. Langton was wont to re- 
peat with some glee certain jests about 
his height, and Dr. Johnson's nickname 
of " Lanky " he took ever with excel- 
lent grace ; and when Garrick had leaped 
upon a chair to shake hands with him, 
in old days, he had knelt, at parting, to 
shake hands with Garrick. But the King's 

* Miss Hawkins says "ten," and may have had the 
extra adopted child in mind. 



215 



awkward digs at his "long legs" he 
found terribly distasteful, nor was he 
thereby disposed to agree with the Doc- 
tor's enthusiastic proclamation, after the 
famous interview of 1767, that George III. 
was "as fine a gentleman as Charles II." 
It was his cherished plan to educate 
his boys and girls at home, and to give 
them a thorough acquaintance with the 
learned languages. No social engage- 
ments were to stand in the way of this 
prime exigency. He was in great haste 
to turn his young brood into Masters and 
Mistresses of Arts. Johnson complained 
to Miss Burney, as they were both tak- 
ing tea at Mrs. Thrale's, that nothing 
would serve Langton but to stand them 
up before company, and get them to re- 
peat a fable or the Hebrew alphabet, sup- 
plying every other word himself, and 
blushing with pride at the vicarious learn- 
ing of his infants. But another of the 
tedious royal jokes, " How does Educa- 
tion go on .?" actually lessened his devo- 
tion to his self-set task, and worried him 
like the water-drop in the story, which 
fell forever on a criminal's head until it 



2l6 



had drilled his brain. Again, both he 
and his wife, even after they had moved 
into the retirement of Great George 
Street, Westminster, in pursuance of their 
design, were far too agreeable and too ac- 
cessible to be spared the incursions of soci- 
ety. In a word, Minerva found her seat 
shaken, and her altar-fires not very well 
tended, and therefore withdrew. Lang- 
ton impressed one axiom on his young 
scholars which they never forgot : ** Next 
best to knowing is to be sensible that 
you do not know." An entirely super- 
fluous waif of a baby was once left at 
the doors of this same many-childrened 
house, to be fed, clothed, and petted by 
Mr. Bennet Langton and Lady Rothes, 
without protest. Dr. Johnson, who made 
friends with all children, was especial- 
ly attached to their third girl, his god- 
daughter, whom he called " pretty Mrs. 
Jane," and "my own little Jenny." The 
very last year of his life her *' most hum- 
ble servant " sent her a loving letter, 
extant yet, and written purposely in a 
large round hand as clear as print. 

" Langton's children are very pretty," 



217 



Johnson wrote to Boswell in 1777, "and 
his lady loses her Scotch." But again, 
during the same year, condescendingly : 
" I dined lately with poor dear Langton. 
I do not think he goes on well. His table 
is rather coarse, and he has his children 
too much about him." Boswell takes 
occasion, in reproducing this censure, to 
reprehend the custom of introducing the 
children after dinner : a parental indul- 
gence to which he, at least, was not ad- 
dicted. The Doctor gave him a mild 
nudge on the subject in remarking later : 
" I left Langton in London. He has 
been down with the militia, and is again 
quiet at home, talking to his little people, 
as I suppose you do sometimes." While 
Langton was in camp on Warley Com- 
mon, in command of the Lincolnshire 
troops, Johnson spent with him five de- 
lightful days, admiring his tall captain's 
blossoming energies, and poking about 
curiously among the tents. Langton 
had fallen, little by little, into a confirmed 
extravagance, so that the moral of Uncle 
Peregrine's sagacious living bade fair to 
be lost upon him. Boswell had a quarrel 



2l8 



with Johnson on the subject of Langton's 
expenditure, during the course of which, 
according to his own report, the Laird of 
Auchinleck suffered a "horrible shock" 
by being told that the best way to drive 
Langton out of his costly house would 
be to put him (Boswell) into it. The 
Doctor was truly concerned, nevertheless, 
about his engaging spendthrift; up to 
the very end, he would implore him to 
keep account- books, even if he had to 
omit his Aristophanes. " He complains of 
the ill effects of habit," grumbled the 
great moralizer, "and he rests content 
upon a confessed indolence. He told his 
father himself that he had 'no turn for 
economy !' but a thief might as well plead 
that he had no turn for honesty." Such 
were the hard hits sacred to those Dr. 
Johnson most esteemed. It transpires 
from his will that, by way of discourage- 
ment, he had lent Langton ;£75o.* 

* It is a pity he did not live to read the jolly A meri" 
can Ballad of Bo7i Gaultier^ which seems to have a sort 
of muddled clairvoyant knowledge of this transaction : 

" Every day the huge Cawana 

Lifted up its monstrous jaws ; 



219 



In the winter of 1785, Langton came 
from the country, and took lodgings in 
Fleet Street, in order to sit beside John- 
son as he lay dying, and hold his hand. 
Nor was he alone in his pious offices : 
the Hooles, Mr. Sestre, and several oth- 
ers were there, to keep constant vigil. 
Miss Burney met Langton in the passage 
December i ith, two days before the end : 
" He could not," she wrote in her journal, 
" look at me, nor I at him." But through 
the foggy and restless nights when John- 
son tried to cheer himself, like More and 
Master William Lilly, by translating into 
Latin some epigrams from the AfitkologzUy 
the true Grecian beside him must have 
been his chief comfort. One can picture 
the old eyes turning to him for sympa- 
thy, perhaps with that same murmured 
" Lanky !" on awaking, which Boswell 
laughed to hear from him one merry 

And it swallowed Langton Rennet, (!) 
And digested Rufus Dawes. 

" Riled, I ween, was Philip Slingsby 
Their untimely deaths to hear ; 
For one author owed him money, (!) 
And the other loved him dear." 



Hebridean morning, twelve years before. 
The last summons did not come in Lang- 
ton's presence. Hurrying over to Bolt 
Court at eight of the fatal evening, he was 
told that all was over three-quarters of 
an hour ago. That large soul had gone 
away, as Leigh Hunt so beautifully said 
of Coleridge, "to an infinitude hardly 
wider than his thoughts." Then Langton, 
w^ho was wont to shape his words with 
grace and ease, went up-stairs, and tried 
to pen a letter to Boswell, which is more 
touching than tears : '* I am now sitting 
in the room where his venerable remains 
exhibit a spectacle, the interesting so- 
lemnity of which, difficult as it would be 
in any sort to find terms to express, so 
to you, my dear sir, whose sensations 
will paint it so strongly, it would be of 
all men the most superfluous to " — and 
there, hopelessly choked and confused, it 
broke off. 

Langton bore Johnson's pall ; and he 
succeeded him as Professor of Ancient 
Literature in the Royal Academy, as Gib- 
bon had replaced Goldsmith in the chair 
of Ancient History. He survived many 



years, the delight of his company to the 
last. He, Hke others, was given in his 
later years to detailing anecdotes of his 
great friend, with an approximation to 
that friend's manner. One lady critic, at 
least, thought that these explosive imita- 
tions did not become " his own serious 
and respectable character." On Decem- 
ber 1 8, 1801, in Anspach Place, South- 
ampton, a venerable nook " between the 
walls and the sea," when Wordsworth, 
Scott, and Coleridge were yet in their 
unheralded prime, when Charles Lamb 
was twenty-six, Byron a dreaming boy on 
the Cotswold hills, and Keats and Shelley 
little fair - eyed children, gentle Bennet 
Langton, known to none of these, and 
somewhat forgotten as a loiterer from 
the march of a glorious yesterday, slipped 
out of life. ** I am persuaded," wrote 
one who knew him well, "that all his in- 
activity, all the repugnance he showed to 
putting on the harness of this world's 
toil, arose from the spirituality of his 
frame of mind ... I believe his mind was 
in Heaven, wheresoever he corporeally 
existed." He was laid under the chancel 



of ancient St. Michael's at Southampton, 
with Johnson's fond benison, " Be my 
soul with Langton's !" inscribed on the 
marble tablet above him.* The Rev. 
John Wool! of Midhurst, Joseph War- 
ton's editor, was one of the few present 
at the funeral ceremony, and he leaves 
us to infer that it had a rather neglectful 
privacy, not, indeed, out of keeping with 
the "godly, righteous, and sober life" it 
closed. Langton's will, drawn up in the 
June of 1800, and preserved in Somer- 
set House, devised to the sole execu- 
trix, his ''dear wife," who outlived him 
by nearly twenty years, his real and per- 
sonal estate, his books, his wines, his 
prints, his horses, and, as a gift particu- 
larly pretty, his right of navigation in the 
river Wey. George Langton was sepa- 
rately provided for, but there were some 
^8000 for the eight younger children. 
The document is crowded with technical 
details, and very long; and the manifest 
inference, on the whole, is that the dear 

• The church has since been "restored," and the fine 
epitaph is now (1890) "skyed" on the south wall of the 
nave. 



223 



squire's affairs were in a prodigious tan- 
gle. There is no wish expressed concern- 
ing his burial, and, what is more curious, 
there are no Christian formulas for the 
committal of the a7iimula vagula blan- 
dula : a lack perhaps not to be wondered 
at in Beauclerk's concise testament, but 
somewhat notable in the case of a person 
who certainly had a soul. 

So went Beauclerk first of the three, 
Langton last, with the good ghost still 
between them, as he in his Jiomespun, 
they in their flowered velvet, had walked 
many a year together on this earth. The 
old companionship had undergone some 
sorry changes ere it fell utterly to dust and 
ashes. Its happy prime had been in the 
Oxford ** Longs," when the Doctor hu- 
mored his lads, and tented under their 
roofs, plucking flowers at one house, and 
romping with dogs at the other; or in 
1764, at the starting of the immortal 
Club, when the two of its founders, who 
had no valid or pretended claim to 
celebrity, perched on the sills like useful 
genii, with a mission to overrule slug- 
gish melancholy, and renew the sparkle 



224 



in abstracted eyes. How supereminently 
they did what they chose to do, and what 
vagaries they roused out of Johnson's pro- 
found hypochondria ! Did not Topham 
Beauclerk s mother once have to reprove 
that august author for a suggestion to 
seize some pleasure-grounds which they 
were passing in a carriage ? " Putting 
such things into young people's heads!" 
said she. Where could the innocent 
Beauclerk's elbow have been at that 
moment, contrary to the canons of po- 
lite society, but in the innocent Langton's 
ribs.^ The gray reprobate, so censured, 
explained to Boswell : " Lady Beauclerk 
has no notion of a joke, sir ! She came 
late into life, and has a mighty unplia- 
ble understanding." Who can forget the 
Doctor's visit to Beauclerk at Windsor, 
when, falling into the clutches of that 
gamesome and ungodly youth, he was 
beguiled from church -going of a fine 
Sunday morning, and strolled about out- 
side, talking and laughing during sermon- 
time, and finally spread himself at length 
on a mossy tomb, only to be told, with a 
giggle and a pleased rub of the hands, 



225 



that he was as bad as Hogarth's Idle 
Apprentice? Or the other visit in the 
north, when, after ceremoniously reliev- 
ing his pockets of keys, knife, pencil, and 
purse, Samuel Johnson, LL.D., deliber- 
ately rolled down a hill, and landed, be- 
tumbled out of all recognition, at the 
bottom? Langton had tried to dissuade 
him, for the incline was very steep, and 
the candidate scarcely of the requisite 
suppleness. ** Oh, but I haven't had a roll 
for such a long time !" pleaded his unan- 
swerable big guest. 

Best of all, we have the history of 
that memorable morning when Beauclerk 
and Langton, having supped together at 
a city tavern, roused Johnson at three 
o'clock at his Inner Temple Lane Cham- 
bers, and brought him to the door, fear- 
ful but aggressive, in his shirt and his lit- 
tle dark wig, and his slippers down at the 
heels, armed with a poker. " What ! and 
is it YOU? Faith, I'll have a frisk with 
you, ye young dogs !" We have visions 
of the Covent Garden inn, and the great 
brimming bowl, with Lord Lansdowne's 
drinking-song for grace ; the hucksters 



226 



and fruiterers staring at the strange cen- 
tral figure, always sure to gather a mob, 
even during the moment he would stand 
by a lady's coach-door in Fleet Street ; 
the merry boat going its way by oar to 
Billingsgate, its mad crew .bantering the 
watermen on the river ; and two of the 
roisterers (equally wild, despite a little 
chronological disparity of thirty years or 
so) scolding the other for hastening off, 
on an afternoon appointment, "to dine 
with wretched unidea'd girls!" What 
golden vagabondism ! ** I heard of your 
frolic t'other night; you'll be in The 
Chronicle t .... I shall have my old friend 
to bail out of the round-house !" said 
Garrick. '* As for Garrick, sirs," tittered 
the pious Johnson aside to his accom- 
plices, ** he dare not do such a thing. 
His wife would not let him !" All this 
mirth and whim sweetened the Doctor's 
heavy life. He had other intimates, oth- 
er disciples. But these were Gay Heart 
and Gentle Heart, who drove his own 
blue - devils away with their idolatrous 
devotion, and whose bearing towards him 
stands ever as the best possible corrobo- 



227 



ration of his great and warm nature. 
With him and for him, they so fill the 
air of the time that to whomsoever has 
but thought of them that hour, London 
must seem lonely without their idyllic 
figures. 

— " Our day is gone : 
Clouds, dews, and dangers come ; our deeds are done." 

There are gods as good for the after- 
years ; but Odin is down, and his pair of 
unreturning birds have flown west and 
east. 



V 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 

1778-1830 




WILLIAM HAZLITT 

HE titles of William Hazlitt's 
first books bear witness to 
the ethic spirit in which he 
began life. From his belov- 
ed father, an Irish dissenting 
minister, he inherited his unworldliness, 
his obstinacy, his love of inexpedient 
truth, and his interest in the emancipa- 
tion and well-being of his fellow-creat- 
ures. Bred in an air of seriousness and 
integrity, the child of twelve announced 
by post that he had spent ** a very agree- 
able day " reading one hundred and sixty 
pages of Priestley, and hearing two good 
sermons. A year later he appeared, un- 
der a Greek signature, in The Shrewsbury 
Chronicle, protesting against sectarian in- 
justice ; an infant herald in the great 
modern movement towards fair play. 
The roll of the portentous periods must 



232 



have made his father weep for pride and 
diversion. William's young head was 
full of moral philosophy and jurispru- 
dence, and he had what is the top of 
luxury for one of his temperament : per- 
fect license of mental growth. Alone 
with his parents (one of whom was al- 
ways a student and a recluse), and for 
the most part without the school-fellows 
who are likely to adjust the perilous ef- 
fects of books, he became choked with 
theories, and thought more of the need- 
ful repeal of the Test Act than of his 
breakfast. He found his way at fourteen 
into the Unitarian College at Hackney, 
but eventually broke from his traces, 
saving his fatherland from the spectacle 
of a unique theologian. During the year 
1795 he saw the pictures at Burleigh 
House, and began to live. Desultory 
but deep study, at home and near home, 
took up the time before his first leisurely 
choice of a profession. His lonely brood- 
ings, his early love for Miss Railton, his 
four enthusiastic months at the Louvre, 
his silent friendship with Wordsworth 
and with Coleridge ; the country walks. 



233 



the pages and prints, the glad tears of his 
youth, — these were the fantastic tutors 
which formed him ; nor had he ever 
much respect for any other kind of train- 
ing. The lesson he prized most was the 
lesson straight from life and nature. He 
comments, tartly enough, on the sophism 
that observation in idleness, or the growth 
of bodily skill and social address, or the 
search for the secret of honorable power 
over people, is not in any wise to be ac- 
counted as learning. Montaigne, who 
was in Hazlitt's ancestral line, was of this 
mind : " Ce qiion sgait droictement, on en 
dispose sans regarder au patron, sa7is tour- 
ner les yeulx vers son livre," Hazlitt in- 
sists, too, that learned men are but " the 
cisterns, not the fountain-heads, of knowl- 
edge." He hated the schoolmaster, and 
has said as witty things of him as Mr. 
Oscar Wilde. Yet his little portrait-study 
of the mere book-worm, in The Conversa- 
tion of Authors, has a never-to-be-forgot- 
ten sweetness. His mental nurture was 
serviceable ; it was of his own choosing ; 
it fitted him for the work he had to do. 
Like Marcus Aurelius, he congratulated 



234 



himself that he did not squander his 
youth " chopping logic and scouring the 
heavens." Hazlitt once entered upon an 
Inquiry whether the Fine Arts are pro- 
moted by Academies ; the answer, from 
him, is readily anticipated. 

"If arts and schools reply," 

he might have added, — and it is a won- 
der that he did not, 

"Give arts and schools the lie!" 

Mr. Matthew Arnold made a famous 
essay on the same topic, and some read- 
ers recollect distinctly that his verdict, 
for England, would be in the affirm- 
ative, whereas it was no such matter. 
Now, no man can conceive of Hazlitt 
presenting both sides of a case so im- 
partially as to be misunderstood, espe- 
cially upon so vital a subject. He past- 
ured, he was not trained ; and therefore 
he would have you and your children's 
children scoff at universities. Indeed, 
though the boy's lack of discipline told 
on him all through life, his reader re- 
grets nothing else which a university 



235 



could have given him, except, perhaps, 
milder manners. Hazlitt was perfectly 
aware that he had too little general 
knowledge ; but general i^nowledge he 
did not consider so good a tool for his 
self -set taslc in life as a persistent, pas- 
sionate study of one or two subjects. 
Again, he is pleased to conjecture, with 
bluntness, that if he had learned more he 
would have thought less. (Perhaps he 
was the friend cited by Elia, who gave 
up reading to improve his originality! 
He was certainly useful to 'Elia in deli- 
cate and curious ways : a whole vein of 
rich eccentricity ready for that sweet 
philosopher's working.) Hear him pro- 
nouncing upon himself at the very end : 
" I have, then, given proof of some talent 
and more honesty ; if there is haste and 
want of method, there is no common- 
place, nor a line that licks the dust. If 
I do not appear to more advantage, I 
at least appear such as I am." Divorce 
that remark and the truth of it from 
Hazlitt, and there is no Hazlitt left. He 
stood for individualism. He wrote from 
what was, in the highest degree for his 



236 



purpose, a full mind, and with that blame- 
less conscious superiority which a full 
mind must needs feel in this empty- 
world. His whole intellectual stand is 
taken on the positive and concrete side 
of things. He has a fine barbaric 
cocksureness; he dwells not with al- 
thoughs and neverthelesses, like Mn 
Symonds and Mr. Saintsbury. " I am 
not one of those," he says, concerning 
Edmund Kean's first appearance in Lon- 
don, ** who, when they see the sun break- 
ing from beHind a cloud, stop to inquire 
whether it is the moon." And he takes 
enormous interest in his own promulga- 
tion, because it is inevitably not only 
what he thinks, but what he has long 
thought. He delivers an opinion with the 
air proper to a host w^ho is master of a 
vineyard, and can furnish name and date 
to every flagon he unseals. 

None of Hazlitt's energies went to 
w^aste : he earned his soul early, and how 
proud he was of the possession ! Retro- 
spection became his forward horizon. He 
was all aglow at the thought of that 
beatific yesterday ; in his every mood 



237 



"the years that are fled knock at the 
door, and enter." He struggled no more 
thereafter, having fixed his behefs and 
found his voice. He saw no occasion to 
change. "As to myself," he wrote at 
fifty, referring to Lamb's well-known " sur- 
feits of admiration " concerning some ob- 
jects once adored, " as to myself, any one 
knows where to have me !" He adds : 
*' In matters of taste and feeling, one 
proof that my conclusions have not been 
quite shallow or hasty is the circumstance 
of their having been lasting. . . . This con- 
tinuity of impression is the only thing on 
which I pride myself." A fine saying in 
the Boswell Rediviviis, attributed to Opie, 
is as clearly expressed elsewhere by Haz- 
litt's self: that a man in his lifetime can 
do but one thing; that there is but one 
effort and one victory, and all the rest is 
as machinery in motion. " What I write 
costs me nothing, but it cost me a great 
deal twenty years ago. I have added lit- 
tle to my stock since then, and taken little 
from it." His sensations, latterly, were 
"July shoots," graftings on the old sap. 
It is his boast in almost his final essav 



238 



that his tenacious brain holds fast while 
the planets are turning. He can look at 
a child's kite in heaven, to the last, with 
the eyes.of a child : *' It pulls at my heart." 
His conservative habit, however, seem- 
ed to teach him everything by inference. 
In 1821, familiar with none of the elder 
dramatists save Shakespeare, he borrowed 
their folios, and shut himself up for six 
weeks at Winterslow Hut on Salisbury 
Plain. He returned to town steeped in 
his theme, and with the beautiful and 
authoritative Lectures written. Appre- 
ciation of the great Elizabethans is com- 
mon enough now ; seventy years ago, 
propagated by Lamb's SpecimenSy 1808, 
it was the business only of adventurers 
and pioneers. Here is a critic indeed 
who, without a suspicion of audacity, 
can arise as a stranger to arraign the 
Arcadia, and "shake hands with Sig- 
ner Orlando Friscobaldo as the oldest 
acquaintance ^' he has ! The thing, ex- 
ceptional as it was, proves that William 
Hazlitt knew his resources. His devoted 
friend Patmore attributes his *' unpre- 
meditated art," tQrse, profound^ original, 



239 



and always moving at full speed, to two 
facts : *' first, that he never, by choice, 
wrote on any topic or question in which 
he did not, for some reason or other, feel 
a deep personal interest ; and, secondly, 
because on all questions on which he did 
so feel, he had thought, meditated, and 
pondered, in the silence and solitqde of 
his own heart, for years and years before 
he ever contemplated doing more than 
thinking of them." Unlike a distin- 
guished historian, who, according to Hor- 
ace Walpole, ** never understood anything 
until he had written of it," Hazlitt brought 
to his every task a mind violently made 
up, and a vocation for special pleading 
which nothing could withstand. 

Sure as he is, he means to be nobody's 
hired guide : a resolve for which the gen- 
eral reader cannot be too grateful. In 
wilful and mellow study of w^hat chance 
threw in his way his strength grew, and 
his limitations with it. It is small won- 
der that he hated schoolmasters, and the 
public which expected of him schoolmas- 
ter platitudes. He had a pride of intellect 
not unlike Rousseau's, and he seems to. 



240 



have had ever in mind Rousseau's cardi- 
nal declaration that if he were no better 
than other men, he was at least different 
from them. Hazlitt defined his own 
functions with proper haughtiness, in the 
amusing apology of Capacity and Genius. 
" I was once applied* to, in a delicate 
emergency, to write an article on a dif- 
ficult subject for an encyclopaedia; and 
was advised to take time, and give it a 
systematic and scientific form; to avail 
myself of all the knowledge that was to 
be obtained upon the subject, and arrange 
it with clearness and method. I made 
answer that, as to the first, I had taken 
time to do all that I ever pretended to 
do, as I had thought incessantly on dif- 
ferent matters for twenty years of my 
life ; that I had no particular knowledge 
of the subject in question, and no head 
for arrangement ; that the utmost I could 
do, in such a case, would be, when a sys- 
tematic and scientific article was pre- 
pared, to write marginal notes upon it, 
to insert a remark or illustration of my 
own (not to be found in former encyclo- 
paedias !) or to suggest a better definition 



241 



than had been offered in the text."* Such 
independence nobly became him, and 
none the less because it kept him poor. 
But in the course of time, he had to work, 
and keep on working, under wretched 
disadvantages. He had spurts of revolt, 
after long experience of compulsory com- 
position ; his darling wish in 1822 (con- 
fided to his wife, of all persons) being 
that he "could marry some woman with a 
good fortune, that he might not be under 
the necessity of writing another line !" 

There was in him absolutely nothing 
of the antiquary and the scholar, as the 
modern world understands those most 
serviceable gentlemen. He was a ** sur- 
veyor," as he said, erroneously, of Bacon. 
He was continuously drawn into the by- 
way, and ever in search of the accidental, 
the occult ; he lusted, like Sir Thomas 
Browne, to find the great meanings of 
minor things. The ** pompous big-wigs " 
of his day, as Thackeray called them, 
hated his informality, his boldly novel 
methods, his vivacity and enthusiasm. 

* The article on The Fine A ris in the Encyclopcedia 
Britannica is signed " W. H." 
16 



242 



He had, within proscribed bounds, an 
exquisite and affectionate curiosity, like 
that of the Renaissance. ** The invention 
of a fable is to me the most enviable ex- 
ertion of human genius : it is the discov- 
ery of a truth to which there is no clew, 
and which, when once found out, can 
never be forgotten." " If the world were 
good for nothing else, it would be a fine 
subject for speculation." It is his delib- 
erate dictum that it were *' worth a life " 
to sit down by an Italian wayside, and 
work out the reason why the Italian su- 
premacy in art has always been along the 
line of color, not along the line of form. 

He depended so entirely upon his mem- 
ory that those who knew him best say 
that he never took notes, neither in gal- 
lery, library, nor theatre ; yet his inaccu- 
racies are few and slight,* and he must 
have secured by this habit a prodigious 

* Mrs. Hazlitt the first, it would appear, undertook to 
verify her husband's quotations for him. His favorite 
metaphor, " Like the tide which flows on to the Propontic, 
and knows no ebb," must have passed many times under 
her eye. Any reference to Othello himself, in the great 
scene of Act III., would have shown four lines for Will- 
iam Hazlitt's explicit one. 



243 



freedom and luxury in the act of writing. 
He would rather stumble than walk ac- 
cording to rule ; and he was so pleasant- 
ly beguiled with some of his own images 
(that, for instance, of immortality the 
bride of the youthful spirit, and of the 
procession of camels seen across the dis- 
tance of three thousand years) that he 
reiterates them upon every tit occasion. 
He cites, twice and thrice, the same pas- 
sages from the Elizabethans. He is a 
masterly quoter, and lingers like a suitor 
upon the borders of old poesy. His in- 
fallibility, like the Pope's, is of narrow 
scope and nicely defined. When he 
steps beyond his accustomed tracks, 
which is seldom, his vagaries are enter- 
taining. You may account for his dec- 
laration that Thomas Warton's sonnets 
rank as the very best in the language, by 
reflecting that he dealt not in sonnets 
and knew nothing of them ; if he prefer 
Hercules Raging to any other Greek trage- 
dy, it is collateral proof that he was no 
wide-travelled Grecian, nor even Euripi- 
deian ; when he gives his distinguished 
preference to Shakespeare's Helena, there 



244 



is small need of adding that Mr. Hazlitt, 
albeit with an affectionate friendship for 
Mary Lamb, with a mother, a sister, a 
dynasty of sweethearts, and two wives, 
was notoriously unlearned in women.* 

The events of hjs life count for so little 
that they are hardly worth recording. 
He was born into a high-principled and 
intelligent family, at Mitre Lane, Maid- 
stone, Kent, on the loth of April, in the 
year 1778. His infancy was passed there 
and in Ireland, his boyhood in New Eng- 
land and in Shropshire. Prior to a long 
visit to Paris, where he made some noble 
copies of Titian, he came in 1802 to 
Bloomsbury, where his elder brother 
John, an advanced Liberal in politics and 
an excellent miniature-painter, had a stu- 
dio ; and here he worked at art for sev- 
eral joyous years, finally abandoning it 
for literature. The portraits he painted, 
utterly lacking in grace, are fraught with 

* Some of Hazlitt's comments on women are full of un- 
conscious humor. In Great and Little 7^^ z>/^^ he admits 
being snubbed by the fair, and adds with grandiloquence : 
*' I took a pride in my disgrace, and concluded that I had 
elsewhere my inheritance!" 



245 



power and meaning ; few of these are 
extant, thanks to the fading and crack- 
ing pigments of the modern schools. 
The old Manchester woman in shadow, 
done in 1803, and the head of his father, 
dating from a twelvemonth later (two 
things to which Hazlitt makes memora- 
ble reference in his essays), are no longer 
distinguishable, save to a very patient 
eye, upon the blackened canvases in his 
grandson's possession. The picture of 
the child Hartley Coleridge, begun at the 
Lakes in 1802, has perished from the 
damp; that of Charles Lamb in the Ve- 
netian doublet survives since 1804, in its 
serious and primitive browns,* as the 
best-known example of an English artist 
not in the catalogues. Its historic value, 
however, is not superior to that of two 
portraits of Hazlitt himself: one a study 
in strong light and shade, with a wreath 
upon the head, now very much time- 
eaten ; and another representing him at 
about the age of twenty-five, with a three- 
quarters front face looking over the right 

* In the National Portrait Gallery, London. 



246 



shoulder, which appeals to the spectator 
like spoken truth. It is all but void of 
the beauty characterizing the striking 
Bewick head (especially as retouched and 
reproduced in Mr. Alexander Ireland's 
valuable book of 1889, which is a sort of 
Hazlitt anthology), and characterizing, no 
less, John Hazlitt's charming miniatures 
of William at five and at thirteen ; there- 
fore it can deal in no self-flattery. Fort- 
unately, we have from the hand which 
knew him best the lank, odd, reserved 
youth in whom great possibilities were 
brewing ; thought and will predominate 
in this portrait, and it expresses the sin- 
cere soul. It would be idle to criticise 
the technique of a work disowned by its 
author. Hazlitt had, as we know from 
much testimony, a most interesting and 
perplexing face, with the magnificent 
brow almost belied by shifting eyes, and 
the petulance and distrust of the mouth 
and chin ; but a face prepossessing on 
the whole from the clear marble of his 
complexion,* remarkable in a land of 

* Biackivood^Sj in the charming fashion of the time, 
repeatedly refers to Hazlitt's *' pimples"; and Byron 



247 



ruddy cheeks. His lonely and peculiar 
life lent him its own hue ; the eager look 
of one indeed a sufferer, but with the 
light full upon him of visions and of 
dreams : 

" Chi pallida si fece sot to Vombra 
SI di Parnaso^ o bevve in sua cisterna V 

In 1798 Hazlitt had his immortal meet- 
ing at Wem with Samuel Taylor Cole- 
ridge. He described himself at this pe- 
riod as " dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like 
a worm by the wayside," striving in vain 
to put on paper the thoughts which op- 
pressed him, shedding tears of vexation 
at his inability, and feeling happy if in 
eight years he could write as many pages. 
The abiding influence of his First Poet 
he has acknowledged in an imperishable 
chapter. For a long while he still kept 
in "the o'erdarkened ways " of Malthus 
and Tucker, or in the shadow, dear to 

credited and supplemented the allegation. Hazlitt him- 
self says somewhere "that to lay a thing to a person's 
charge from which he is perfectly free, shows spirit and 
invention !" The calumny is not worth mention, except 
as a fair specimen of the journalistic methods against which 
literary men had to contend some eighty years ago. 



248 



him, of Hobbes; but in 1817 the flood- 
gates broke, the pure current gushed out; 
and in the Characters of Shakespeare s 
Plays we have the primal pledge of Haz- 
litt as we know him, ** such as had never 
been before him, such as will never be 
again." From a ** dumbness " and dif- 
fidence extreme, he developed into the 
readiest of writers ; his sudden pages, 
year after year, transcribed in his slant 
large hand, went to the printers rapidly 
and at first draft. The longer he used 
his dedicated pen, the freer, the brighter, 
the serener it grew. In the fourteen or 
fifteen of his books which deal with gen- 
ius and the conduct of life, there is, 
throughout, an indescribable unaffected 
zest, a self -same and unwavering certi- 
tude of handling. Once he learned his 
trade, he gave himself a large field and 
an easy rein. He never warmed towards 
a subject chosen for him. His conver- 
sation was non-professional. He consid- 
ered a discussion as to the likelihood of 
the weather's holding up for to-morrow 
as "the end and privilege of a life of 
study." 



249 



In London, as soon as he had aban- 
doned painting, he became a parliamen- 
tary reporter, and began to lecture on 
the English philosophers and metaphy- 
sicians. He furnished his famous dra- 
matic criticisms to The Morning Chro7i- 
icle, The Chainpion, The Examiner y and 
The Times, and he acted later as home 
editor of The Liberal, He married, on 
May-day of 1808, Miss Sarah Stoddart. 
who owned the property near Salisbury 
where he afterwards spent melancholy 
years alone. He fulfilled one human duty 
perfectly, for he loved and reared his son. 
A most singular infatuation for the un- 
lovely daughter of his landlady; a sec- 
ond inauspicious marriage in 1824 with 
a Mrs. Isabella Bridgwater ; a prolonged 
journey on the Continent ; the failure of 
the publishers of his Life of Napoleon^ 
which thus in his needful days brought 
him no competence; a long illness hero- 
ically borne, and a burial in the parish 
churchyard of St. Anne's, under a head- 
stone raised, in a romantic remorse after 
an estrangement, by Charles Wells, the 
author oi Joseph and his Brethren, — these 



2 so 



round out the meagre details of Hazlitt's 
life. He died in the arms of his son and 
of his old friend Charles Lamb,* on the 
1 8th of September, 1830, at 6 Frith 
Street, Soho. 

His domestic experiences, indeed, had 
been nearly as extraordinary as Shelley's. 
Sarah Walker, of No. 9 Southampton 
Buildings, is a sort of burlesque counter- 
part of that other "spouse, sister, angel," 
Emilia Viviani. Nothing in literary his- 
tory is much funnier than Mr. Hazlitt's 
kind assistance to Mrs. Hazlitt in secur- 
ing her divorce, going to visit her at 
Edinburgh, and supplying funds and ad- 
vice over the teacups, while the process 
was pending, unless it be Shelley's ingen- 
uous invitation to his deserted young 
wife to come and dwell forever with 
himself and Mary ! The silent dramatic 
withdrawal of the second Mrs. Hazlitt, 
the well-to-do relict of a colonel, who is 

* Lamb had been his groomsman twent^'-two years be- 
fore, at the Church of St. Andrew, Holborn, *' and like to 
have been turned out several times during the ceremony ; 
anything awful makes me laugh!" as he confessed in a 
letter to Southey in 1815. 



251 



henceforth swallowed up in complete ob- 
livion, is a feature whose like is missing 
in Shelley's romance. Events in Hazlitt's 
path were not many, and his inner ca- 
lamities seem somehow subordinated to 
exterior workings. It is not too much 
to say that to the French Revolution and 
the white heat of hope it diffused over 
Europe he owed the renewal of the very 
impetus within him : his moral probity, 
his mental vigor, and his physical cheer. 
His measure of men and things was fixed 
by its standard. Other enthusiasts wa- 
vered and went back to the flesh-pots of 
Egypt, but not he. Et cuncta terrarian 
stcbacta prceter atrocem anvnum Catonis. 
Towards the grandest inconsistency this 
world has seen, he bore himself with a 
consistency nothing less than touching. 
Everywhere, always, as a friend who un- 
derstood him well reminds a later gen- 
eration, " Hazlitt was the only man of 
letters in England who dared openly to 
stand by the French Revolution, through 
good and evil report, and who had the 
magnanimity never to turn his back upon 
its child and champion." The ruin of 



252 



Napoleon, and the final news that " the 
hunter of greatness and of glory was him- 
self a shade," meant more to him than 
the relinquishment of his early and cher- 
ished art, or the fading of the long dream 
that his heart "should find a heart to 
speak to." On his last autumn after- 
noon, he said what no one else would 
have dared to say for him : "I have had 
a happy life." Such it was, if we are to 
compute happiness by souls, and not by 
the incidents which befall them. What 
were the things which atoned to this re- 
former for the curse of a mind too sen- 
tient, a heart never far from breaking? 
Over and above all amended and amend- 
ing abuses, the memory of the Rem- 
brandts on the walls of Burleigh House ; 
the waving crest of the Tuderley woods ; 
the sky, the turf, "a w^inding road, and 
a three -hours' march to dinner"; the 
impersonator of Richard III. most to 
his mind, who lighted the stage, "and 
fought as if drunk with wounds"; and 
the figure (how pastoral and tender !) 
of the shepherd - boy bringing a nest 
for his young mistress's sky -lark, "not 



253 



doomed to dip his wings in the dap- 
pled dawn." What heresy to the an- 
cients would be this creed of poetic 
compensation ! Montesquieu adhered to 
it ; but hardly from baffled and impas- 
sioned Hazlitt, dying in his prime, would 
the avowal have been expected. Yet he 
had written almost always, as Jeffrey saw, 
in "a happy intoxication." Like the sun- ^ 
dial, in one of the most charming among 
his miscellaneous essays, he kept count 
only of the hours of joy. 

Hazlitt 's erratic levees among coffee- 
house wits and politicians, his slack dress, 
his rich and fitful talk, his beautiful fierce 
head, go to make up any accurate im- 
pression of the man. Mr. P. G. Patmore 
has drawn him for us ; a strange portrait 
from a steady hand : in certain moods 
" an effigy of silence," pale, anxious, ema- 
.ciated, with an awful look ever and anon, 
like the thunder-cloud in a clear heaven, 
sweeping over his features w^ith still 
fury.* He was so much at the mercy of 

* Orrery had seen this same bitter indignation over- 
whelm Swift at times, " so that it is scarcely possible for 
human features to carry in them more terror and aus- 



254 



an excitable and extra-sensitive organi- 
zation that an accidental failure to re- 
turn his salute upon the street, or, above 
all, the gaze of a servant as he entered 
a house, plunged him into an excess of 
wrath and misery. Full, at other times, 
of scrupulous good faith and generosity, 
he would, under the stress of a fancied 
hurt, say and write malicious things about 
those he most honored. He must have 
been a general thorn in the flesh, for he 
had no tact whatever. " I love Henry," 
said one of Thoreau's friends, "but I can- 
not like him." Shy, splenetic, with Dry- 
den's " down look," readier to give than 
to exchange, Hazlitt was a riddle to stran- 
gers' eyes. His deep voice seemed at 
variance with his gliding step and his 
glance, bright but sullen ; his hand felt 
as if it were the limp, cold fin of a fish, 
and was an unlooked-for accompaniment 
to the fiery soul warring everywhere with 
darkness, and drenched in altruism. His 
habit of excessive tea-drinking, like Dr. 
Johnson's, was to keep down sad thoughts. 
For sixteen years before he died, from 
the day on which he formed his resolu- 



255 



tion, Hazlitt. never touched spirits of any- 
kind. Profuse of money when he had it, 
he lacked heart, says Mr. Patmore, to live 
well. Wherever he dwelt there was what 
Carlyle, in Hunt's case, called " tinker- 
dom "; his marriage, and his residence 
under the august roof which had been 
Milton's,* did not mend matters for him. 
He covered the walls and mantel-pieces 
of London landladies, after the fashion 
of the French bohemian painters, with 
samples of his noblest style ; and the 
savor of yesterday's potions of strong tea 
exhaled into their curtains. Never was 
there, despite his confessional attitude, so 
non - communicative a soul. He never 
corresponded with anybody ; he never 
would walk arm in arm with anybody ; 
he never, perhaps from horror of the 
•* patron " bogie, dedicated a book to any- 
body. De Quincey knew a man warmly 
disposed towards Hazlitt who learned to 
shudder and dread daggers when poor 
Hazlitt, with a gesture habitual to him, 

* At 19 York Street, Westminster. The house, with 
its tablet "To the Prince of Poets" set by Hazlitt him- 
self, was destroyed in 1877. 



256 



thrust his right hand between the but- 
tons of his waistcoat! And he once 
cheerfully requested of a cheerful col- 
league : " Write a character of me for the 
next number. I want to know why ev- 
erybody has such a dislike to me." As 
a social factor he was something atro- 
cious.* The most humane of men, his 
suspicions and shyings cut him off com- 
pletely from humanity. The base war 
waged upon him by the great Tory mag- 
azines could not have affected him so 
deeply that it changed his demeanor 
towards his fellows ; for he had the met- 



* A snappy unpublished letter to Hunt, sold among 
the Hazlitt papers at Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge's, in 
the late autumn of 1893, complains bitterly of kind Basil 
Montagu, who had once put off a proffered visit from 
Hazlitt, on the ground that a party of other guests was 
expected. The deterred one was naturally wroth. **Yet 
after this, I am not to look at him a little in abstracto I 
This is what has soured me and made me sick of friend- 
ship and acquaintanceship." Hazlitt confounded cause 
and effect. He was unwelcome in general gatherings 
where his genius was unappreciated ; and we may be sure 
Montagu was sorry for it when, in the interests of concord, 
he held up so deprecating and inhospitable a hand. But 
among those who nursed Hazlitt in his last illness, Basil 
Montagu was not the least loyal. 



257 

tie of a paladin, which no invective could 
break. But, alas ! he had '* the canker 
at the heart," which is no fosterer of 
"the rose upon the cheek." 

With all this fever and heaviness in 
Hazlitt's blood, he had a hearty laugh, 
musical to hear. Haydon, in his exag- 
gerated manner, reports an uncharitable 
conversation held with him once on the 
subject of Leigh Hunt in Italy, during 
which the two misconstruing critics, in 
their great glee, *' made more noise than 
all the coaches, wagons, and carts outside 
in Piccadilly." His smile was singularly 
grave and sweet. Mrs. Shelley wrote, on 
coming back to England, in her widow- 
hood, and finding him much changed : 
*' His smile brought tears to my eyes ; it 
was like melancholy sunlight on a ruin." 
A man who sincerely laughs and smiles 
is somewhat less than half a cynic. If 
there be any alive at this late hour who 
questions the genuineness of Hazlitt's 
high spirits, he may be referred to the 
essay On Going a Journey, with the paean 
about " the gentleman in the parlor," in 
the finest emulation of Cowley ; but chief- 
17 



2S8 



ly and constantly to The Fight, with its 
lingering De-Foe-like details, sprinkled, 
not in the least ironically, with gold- 
dust of Chaucer and the later poets: the 
rich-ringing, unique Fight,^ predecessor 

* The Fight appeared in the New Monthly Maga- 
zine in 1822. It was itself antedated by The Fancy ot 
John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats's friend and Hood's 
brother-in-law, which was printed in 1820. The jolly 
iambics are as inspired as the essay. "P. C." is, of 
course, Pugilistic Club. 

" Oh, it is life! to see a proud 

And dauntless man step, full of hopes. 
Up to the P. C. stakes and ropes, 
Throw in his hat, and with a spring 
Get gallantly within the ring ; 
Eye the wide crown, and walk awhile 
Taking all cheerings with a smile ; 
To see him strip ; his well-trained form, 
White, glowing, muscular, and warm, 
All beautiful in conscious power, 
Relaxed and quiet, till the hour ; 
His glossy and transparent frame, 
In radiant plight to strive for fame ! 
To look upon the clean shapM limb 
In silk and flannel clothed trim ; 
While round the waist the kerchief tied 
Makes the flesh glow in richer pride. 
'Tis more than life to watch him hold 
His hand forth, tremulous yet bold, 
Over his second's, and to clasp 
His rival's in a quiet grasp; 



259 



of Borrows famous burst about the '*all 
tremendous bruisers" of Lavengro ; and 
not to be matched in our peaceful litera- 
ture save with the eulogy and epitaph of 
Jack Cavanagh, by the same hand. Di- 
vers hints have been circulated, within 
sixty- odd years, that Mr. Hazlitt was a 
timid person, also that he had no turn 

To watch the noble attitude 
He takes, the crowd in breathless mood; 
And then to see, with adamant start, 
The muscles set, and the great heart 
Hurl a courageous splendid light 
Into the eye, and then — the Fight!" 

But this is general : Hazlitt is specific. His particular 
Fight was the great one between Neate of Bristol and 
Tom Hickman the Gasman, Neate being the victor. On 
May 20, 1823, Neate met Spring of Hertfordshire (so 
translated out of his natural patronymic of Winter), in a 
contest for the championship, and Neate himself went 
under. This latter battle was mock -heroically celebrated 
by Maginn in BlackivoocV s, and Hood's casual meteoro- 
logical simile heaped up honors on the winner : 

"The Spring! I shrink and shudder at her name. 
For why? I find her breath a bitter blighter, 
And suffer from her blows as if they came 
From Spring the fighter!" 

So that literature may be said to have set close to the 
ropes in those days, from first to last. 



26o 



for jokes. These ingenious calumnies 
may be trusted to meet the fate of the 
Irish pagan fairies, small enough at the 
start, whose punishment it is to dwin- 
dle ever and ever away, and point a mor- 
al to succeeding generations. Hazlitt's 
paradoxes are not of malice prepense, 
but are the ebullitions both of pure 
fun and of the truest philosophy. " The 
only way to be reconciled with old 
friends is to part with them for good." 
** Goldsmith had the satisfaction of 
good - naturedly relieving the necessi- 
ties of others, and of being harassed to 
death with his own." " Captain Bur- 
ney had you at an advantage by never 
understanding you." Scattered mention 
of " people who live on their own estates 
and on other people's ideas "; of Jeremy 
Bentham, who had been translated into 
French, "when it was the greatest pity 
in the world that he had not been" trans- 
lated into English "; of the Coleridge of 
prose, one of whose prefaces is " a mas- 
terpiece of its kind, having neither begin- 
ning, middle, nor end "; and even of the 
"singular animal," John^ Bull himself, 



26l 



since " being the beast he is has made 
a man of him ": — these are no ill shots 
at the sarcastic. Congreve, v/ith all his 
quicksilver wit, could not outgo Haz- 
litt on Thieves, videlicet : ** Even a high- 
wayman, in the way of trade, may blow 
out your brains ; but if he uses foul lan- 
guage at the same time, I should say 
he was no gentleman !" Hazlitt's sense 
of humor has quality, if not quantity. 
How was it this same sense of hu- 
mor, this fine-grained reticence, which 
wrote, nay, printed, in 1823, the piteous 
and ludicrous canticle of the goddess 
Sarah ? 

Hazlitt was a great pedestrian from his 
boyhood on, and, like Goldsmith, a fair 
hand at the game of fives, which he played 
by the day. Wherever he was, his pock- 
et bulged with a book. It gave him keen 
pleasure to set down the hour, the place, 
the mood, and the weather of various 
ecstatic first readings. He became ac- 
quainted with Love for Love in a low 
wainscoted tavern parlor between Farn- 
ham and Alton, looking out upon a gar- 
den of larkspur, with a portrait of Charles 



262 



II. crowning the chimney-piece; in his 
father's house he fell across Tom Jones , 
"a child's Tom Jones, an innocent creat- 
ure"; he bought Milton and Burke at 
Shrewsbury, on the march ; he looked up 
from Mrs. Inchbald's Si7nple Story, when 
its pathos grew too poignant, to find " a 
summer shower dropping manna" on his 
head, and '* an old crazy hand-organ play- 
ing i?^^//^^^^/r." And on April lo, 1798, 
his twentieth birthday, he sat down to a 
volume of the New Eloise, a book which 
kept its hold upon him, ** at the inn of 
Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a 
cold chicken !" The frank epicurean cat- 
alogue, as of equal spiritual and corpo- 
real delight, is worth notice. Do we not 
know that Mr. Hazlitt had wood - par- 
tridges for supper, in his middle age, at 
the Golden Cross, in Rastadt, near May- 
ence } Yet he failed to record what book 
lay by his plate, and distracted his atten- 
tion from her w^ho had been a widow, and 
who was already planning her respecta- 
ble exit from his society. Evidence that 
he was an eater of taste is to be accumu- 
lated eagerly by his partisans, for eat- 



263 



ing is one of many engaging human 
characteristics which establish him as 
lovable — that is, j)osthumously lovable. 
Barry Cornwall was so jealously tender 
of his memory that he would have for- 
bidden any one to write of Hazlitt who 
had not known him. As he did not warm 
miscellaneously to everybody, it followed 
that his friends were few. We do not 
forget which one of these, during their 
only difference, thought ** to go to his 
grave without finding, or expecting to 
find, such another companion."* 

Hazlitt would have set himself down, 
by choice, as a metaphysician. Up to the 
time when his Life of Napoleon was well 
in hand, he used to afiirm that the anon- 
ymous Principles of Human Action, which 
he completed at twenty, in the literary 
style of the azoic age, was his best work. 
He was rather proud, too, of the Char- 
acteristics in the Manner of Rochefou- 
cauld's Maxiins, his one dreary book, 
which contains a couple of inductions 
worthy of Pascal, some sophistries and 

* "Lamb, in 'M Letter to R. Southey, Esq^ 



264 



hollow cynicisms not native to Hazlitt's 
brain, and a vast number of the very pro- 
fessorisms which he scouted. Maxims, 
indeed, are sown broadcast over his pages, 
which Alison the historian classified as 
better to quote than to read ; but they 
gain by being incidental, and embedded 
in the body of his fancies. His vein of 
original thought comes nowhere so per- 
fectly into play as in its application to 
affairs. His pen is anything but abstruse, 

— *' Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind." 

He did not recognize that to display his 
highest power he needed deeds and men, 
and their tangible outcome to be criti- 
cised. His preferences were altogether 
wed to the past. In his essay on Envy 
he excuses, with a wise reflection, his 
comparative indifference to living writ- 
ers : ** We try to stifle the sense we have 
of their merit, not because they are new 
or modern, but because we are not sure 
they will ever be old." Or, as Professor 
Wilson said of him, with tardy but win- 
ning kindness : " In short, if you want 



265 



Hazlitt's praise, you must die for it. . . . 
and it is almost worth dying for."* Yet 
what an eye he has for the idiosyncrasy 
at his elbow, be it in the individual or 
in the race ! Every contemporary of his, 
every painter, author, actor, and states- 
man of whom he cared to write at all, 
stands forth under his touch in delicate 
and aggressive outlines from which a wind 
seems to blow back the mortal draperies, 
like a figure in a triumphal procession 
of Mantegna's. His manner is essentially 
pictorial. His sketches of Cobbett and 
of Northcote, in The Spirit of Obliga- 
tions ; of Johnson, in The Periodical Es- 
sayists ; of Sir Thomas Browne and Bish- 
op Taylor ; and of Coleridge and Lamb, 
drawn more than once, with great power, 
from the life, will never be excelled. His 
philippic on The Spirit of Monarchy ^ or 
that on The Regal Character, is a pure 

* The man of MartiaPs epigram had other "views.*' 
The capital translation is Dr. Goldwin Smith's; 

" Vacerra lauds no living poet's lays, 
But for departed genius keeps his praise. 
I, alas, live ; nor deem it worth my while 
To die, that I may win Vacerra's smile." 



266 



vitriol flame, to scorch the necks of 
princes. His comments upon EngUsh 
and Continental types, if gathered from 
the necessarily promiscuous Notes of a 
Journey, would make a most diverting and 
illuminating duodecimo; the indictment 
of the French is especially masterly. The 
Spirit of the Age, The Plain Speaker, 
the Northcote book, The English Comic 
Writers, and the noble and little - read 
Political Essays are packed with vital per- 
sonalities. So is The Characters of Shake- 
speare s Playsy full of beautiful metaphys- 
ical analysis, as well as of vivifying 
criticism. This lavish accumulation of 
material, never put to use according to 
modern methods, must appear to some 
as a collection of interest awaiting the 
broom and the hanging committee ; but 
until the end of time it will be a place of 
delight for the scholar and the lover of 
virtue. Hazlitt's genius for assortment 
and sense of relative values were not de- 
veloped ; he was in no wise a construc- 
tive critic. Mr. R. H. Hutton complained 
once of Mr. Matthew Arnold that he 
ranked his men, but did not portray them. 



267 



Now Hazlitt, whose search is all for char- 
acter, irrespective of the historic position, 
falls into the opposite extreme : he por- 
trays his men, but does not rank them. An 
attempt to break up into single file the 
merit which, with him, marches abreast, 
he would look upon as a bit of arrogance 
and rank impiety. He has nothing to 
say of the quality which stamps Bavius 
as the best elegiac poet between Gray 
and Tennyson, or of the irony of Maevius, 
which would place his dramas, were it 
not for their loose construction, next to 
Moliere's. He does not care a fig for com- 
parisons ; or, rather, he wishes them left 
to the gods, and to his perceiving read- 
er. Meanwhile, one face after another 
shines clear upon the wall, and breathes 
enchantment on a passer-by. 

It is very difficult to be severe with 
William Hazlitt, who was towards him- 
self so outspokenly severe. Every strict- 
ure upon him, as well as every defence to 
be urged for it, may be taken out of his 
own mouth. Even the Liber Amoris, as 
must always have been discerned, dem- 
onstrates not only his weakness, but his 



268 



essential uprightness and innocence. His 
vindication is written large in Depth and 
Superficiality, in The Pleasures of Hat- 
ing, in The Disadvantage of Intellectual 
Superiority. His "true Hamlet" is as 
faithful a sketch of the author as is New- 
man's celebrated definition of a gentle- 
man. Hazlitt says a tender word for Dr. 
Johnson's prejudices which covers and 
explains many of his own. Who can call 
him irritable, recalling the splendid ex- 
position of merely selfish content, in 
the opening paragraphs of the essay on 
Good Nature ? Yet, with all his lofty and 
endearing qualities, he had a warped and 
soured mind, a constitutional disability to 
find pleasure in persons or in conditions 
which were quiescent. He would have 
every one as mettlesome and gloomily 
vigilant as he was himself. His perfectly 
proper apostrophe to the lazy Coleridge 
at Highgate to '* start up in his promised 
likeness, and shake the pillared rottenness 
of the world," is somewhat comic. Haz- 
litt's nerves never lost their tension ; to 
the last hour of his last sickness he was 
ready for a bout. Much of his personal 



269 



grief arose from his refusal to respect 
facts as facts, or to recognize in existing 
evil, including the calamitous perfumed 
figure of Turveydrop gloriously reigning, 
what Vernon Lee calls ** part of the mech- 
anism for producing good." He bit at 
the quietist in a hundred ways, and 
with choice venom. ** There are persons 
who are never very far from the truth, 
because the slowness of their faculties 
will not suffer them to make much prog- 
ress in error. These are * persons of great 
judgment.' The scales of the mind are 
pretty sure to remain even when there 
is nothing in them." He was a natural 
snarler at sunshiny people with full pock- 
ets and feudal ideas, like Sir Walter, who 
got along with the ogre What Is, and 
even asked him to dine. In fact, William 
Hazlitt hated a great many things with 
the utmost enthusiasm, and he was im- 
polite enough to say so, in and out of 
season. The Established Church and all 
its tenets and traditions were only less 
monstrous in his eyes than legendry, me- 
diaevalism, and " the shoal of friars." He 
knew, from actual experience, the loyalty 



270 



and purity of the early Unitarians, and 
he praised these with all his heart and 
tongue. As far as one can make out, he 
had not the remotest conception of the 
breadth and texture of Christianity as a 
whole. His theory, for he practised no 
creed except the cheap one of universal 
dissent, was a faint - colored local Puri- 
tanism ; and that, as the Merry Monarch 
(an excellent judge of what was not 
what!) reminds us, is "no religion for a 
gentleman." But more than this, Haz- 
litt had no apprehension of the super- 
natural in anything ; he was very unspir- 
itual. It is curious to see how he sidles 
away from the finer English creatures 
whom he had to handle. Sidney almost 
repels him, and he dismisses Shelley, on 
one occasion, with an inadequate but apt 
allusion to the "hectic flutter" of his 
verse. Living in a level country with no 
outlook upon eternity, and no deep in- 
sight into the human past, nor fully un- 
derstanding those who had wider vision 
and more instructed utterance than his 
own, it follows that beside such men as 
those just named, then as now, Hazlitt 



271 



has a crude villageous mien. He had 
his refined sophistications ; chief among 
them was a surpassing love of natural 
beauty. But he relished, on the whole, 
the beef and beer of life. The normal was 
what he wrote of with " gusto " ; a word 
he never tired of using, and which one 
must use in speaking of himself. While 
he is an admirable arbiter of what is or is 
not truly intellectual, he is all at sea when 
he has to discuss, for instance, emotional 
poetry, or, what is yet more difficult to 
him, poetry purely poetic; its inevitable 
touch of the fantastic, the mystical, puts 
his wits completely to rout. The stern, 
lopsided, and magnificent article on Shel- 
ley's Posthumous Poeins in the Edinburgh 
Review for July, 1824, and his impatience 
with Coleridge at his best, perfectly exem- 
plify this limitation. Despite his partiali- 
ty for Rousseau and certain of the early 
Italian painters, most of the men whose 
genius he seizes upon and exalts with 
unerring success are the men who dis- 
play, along with enormous acumen and 
power, nothing which betokens the mor- 
bid and exquisite thing we have learned 



272 



to call modern culture. Hazlitt, fortu- 
nately for us, was not over-civilized, had 
no cinque -cento instincts, and would 
have groaned aloud over such hedonism 
as Mr. Pater's. Homespun and manly as 
he is, who can help feeling that his was 
but an imperfect development? that, as 
Mr. Arnold said so paternally of Byron, 
" he did not know enough " ? He lacked 
both mental discipline and moral gov- 
ernance. He has the wayward and ap- 
pealing Celtic utterance ; the manner 
made of largeness and simpleness, all 
shot and interwoven with the hues of 
romanticism. Prodigal that he is, he 
cannot stoop to build up his golden 
piecemeal, or to clinch his generalizations, 
thrown down loosely, side by side. Es- 
oteric thrift is not in him, nor the spir- 
it of co-operation, nor the sweetest of ar- 
tistic anxieties, that of marching in line. 
He has a knight-errant pen ; his glad and 
chivalrous services to literature resemble 
those of an outlaw to the commonwealth. 
Despite his personal value, he stands de- 
tached ; he is episodic, and represents 
nothing. 



273 



"The earth hath bubbles as the water hath, 
And this is of them," 

He misses the white station of a classic; 
for the classics have equipoise, and inter- 
relationship. But it is great cause for 
thankfulness that William Hazlitt can- 
not be made other than he is. Time can 
not take away his height and his red-gold 
garments, bestow on him the " smoother 
head of hair " which Lamb prayed for, 
and shrivel him into one of several very 
wise and v^edivy precieux. No: he stalks 
apart in state, the splendid Pasha of Eng- 
lish letters. 

Hazlitt boasts, and permissibly, of gen- 
uine disinterestedness : " If you wish to 
see me perfectly calm," he remarks some- 
where, " cheat me in a bargain, or tread 
on my toes."* But he cannot promise 

* This was the spirit of Henry Fielding on his last 
voyage, hoisted aboard among the watermen at RedclifFe, 
and hearing his emaciated body made the subject of jeers 
and laughter. *' No man who knew me," he writes in 
his journal, " will think 1 conceived any personal resent- 
ment at this behavior ; but it was a lively picture of that 
cruelty and inhumanity in the nature of man which I 
have often contemplated with concern, and which leads 
i8 



274 



the same behavior for a sophism repeated 
in his presence, or a truth repelled. In 
his sixth year he had been taken, with 
his brother and sister, to America, and 
he says that he never afterwards got 
out of his mouth the delicious tang of a 
frost-bitten New England barberry. It 
is tolerably sure that the blowy and 
sunny atmosphere of the young repub- 
lic of 1783-7 got into him also. Liberal- 
ism was his birthright. He flourishes his 
fighting colors ; he trembles with eager- 
ness to break a lance with the arch-ene- 
mies; he is a champion, from his cradle, 
against class privilege, of slaves who know 
not what they are, nor how to wish for 
liberty. But he cannot do all this in the 
laughing Horatian w^ay ; he cannot keep 
cool ; he cannot mind his object. If he 
could, he would be the white devil of 

the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melan- 
choly thoughts." It is a fine passage, and a strong heart, 
not given to boasting, penned it. Poor Hazlitt could not 
bear even an unintentional slight without imputing dia- 
bolical malice to the offender. Yet it was certainly true 
that, in his saner hours, he could suffer personal discom- 
fort in public without flinching, and deplore the habit 
which imposed it, rather than the act. 



275 



debate. There are times when he speaks, 
as does Dr. Johnson, out of all reason, 
because aware of the obstinacy and the 
bad faith of his hearers. Morals are too 
much in his mind, and, after their wont, 
they spoil his manners. Like the Caro- 
line Platonist, Henry More, he " has to 
cut his way through a crowd of thoughts 
as through a wood." His temper breaks 
like a rocket, in little lurid smoking stars, 
over every ninth page ; he lays about 
him at random ; he raises a dust of side- 
issues. Hazlitt sometimes reminds one 
of Burke himself gone off at half-cock. 
He will not step circumspectly from light 
to light, from security to security. Some 
of his very best essays, as has been noted, 
have either no particular subject, or fail 
to follow the one they have. Nor is he 
any the less attractive if he be heated, 
if he be swearing 

" By the blood so basely shed 
Of the pride of Norfolk's line," 

or scornfully settling accounts of his own 
with the asinine public. When he is not 
driven about by his moods, Hazlitt is set 



276 



Upon his fact alone ; which he thinks is 
the sole concern of a prose-writer. Grace 
and force are collateral affairs. " In seek- 
ing for truth," he says proudly, in words 
fit to be the epitome of his career, " I 
sometimes found beauty." 

The Edinburgh Review, in an article 
written while Hazlitt was in the full of 
his activity, summed up his shortcomings. 
"There are no great leading principles 
of taste to give singleness to his aims, 
nor any central points in his mind around 
which his feelings may revolve and his 
imaginations cluster. There is no suffi- 
cient distinction between his intellectual 
and his imaginative faculties. He con- 
founds the truths of imagination with 
those of fact, the processes of argument 
with those of feeling, the immunities of 
intellect with those of virtue." Here is 
an admirable arraignment, which goes 
to the heart of the matter. Hazlitt him- 
self corroborates it in a confession of 
gallant directness : *' I say what I think ; 
I think what I feel." It is this fatal 
confusion which makes his course now 
rapid and clear, anon clogged with va- 



277 



garies, as if his rudder had run into a 
mesh of sea -weed; it is this which de- 
flects his judgments, and leads him, in 
the shrewd phrase of a modern critic, to 
praise the right things for the wrong 
reasons. Hazlitt's prejudices are very- 
instructive, even while he bewails Lan- 
dor s or Cobbett's, and tells you, as it 
were, with a tear in his eye, when he has 
done berating the French, that, after all, 
they are Catholics ; and as for manners, 
" Catholics must be allowed to carry it, 
all over the world !" His exquisite treat- 
ment of Northcote, a winning old sharp- 
er for whom he cared nothing, is all due 
to his looking like a Titian portrait. So 
with the great Duke : Hazlitt hated the 
sight of him, ** as much for his paste- 
board visor of a face as for anything 
else." One of his justifications for ador- 
ing Napoleon was, that at a levee a young 
English officer named Lovelace drew from 
him an endearing recognition : ** I per- 
ceive, sir, that you bear the name of the 
hero of Richardson's romance." If you 
look like a Titian portrait, if you read and 
remember Richardson, you may trust a 



278 



certain author, who knows a distinction 
when he sees it, to set you up for the 
idol of posterity. HazHtt thought Mr. 
Wordsworth's long and immobile coun- 
tenance resembled that of a horse ; and 
it is not impossible that this conviction, 
twin -born with that other that Mr. 
Wordsworth was a mighty poet, is re- 
sponsible for various gibes at the august 
contemporary whose memory owes so 
much to his pen in other moods. 

He is the most ingenuous and agree- 
able egoist we have had since the sev- 
enteenth-century men. It must be re- 
membered how little he was in touch 
outwardly with social and civic affairs ; 
how he was content to be the always 
young looker-on. There was nothing for 
him to do but fall back, under given con- 
ditions, upon his own capacious entity. 
The automaton called William Hazlitt is 
to him a toy made to his hand, to be 
reached without effort ; the digest of all 
his study and the applicable test of all 
his assumptions. He knew himself; he 
could, and did, with decorum, approve or 
chastise himself in open court. " His 



2 79 



life was of humanity the sphere." His 
" I " has a strong constituency in the 
other twenty-five initials. In this sense, 
and in our current cant, Hazlitt is noth- 
ing if not subjective, super-personal. His 
sort of sentimentalism is an anomaly 
in Northern literature, even in the age 
when nearly every literary Englishman of 
note was variously engaged in baring his 
breast. Whether he would carp or sigh, 
he will still hold you by the button, as he 
held host and guest, master and valet, 
to pour into their adjacent ears the mad 
extravagances of the Liber Amoris. He 
gets a little tired at his desk, after bat- 
tling for hours with the slow and stu- 
pid in behalf of the beauty ever-living; 
he wants fresh air and a reverie ; he must 
digress or die. And from abstractions 
bardic as Carlyle's, he runs gladly to his 
own approved self. This very circum- 
stance, which lends Hazlitt's pages their 
curious blur and stain, is the same which 
stamps his individuality, and gives those 
who are drawn towards him at all an un- 
speakably hearty relish for his company. 
What shall we call it } — the habit, not 



>So 



maudlin in him, of speaking out, of 
draining his well of emotion for the 
benefit of the elect ; nay, even of delicate 
lyric whimperings, beside which 

" Poore Petrarch's long-deceased woes " 

take on a tinsel glamour. As the dancing- 
girl carries her jewels, every one in sight 
as she moves, so our " Faustus, that was 
wont to make the schools ring with Sic 
proboT steps into the forum jingling and 
twinkling with personalia. He is quite 
aware of the figure he may cut : he does 
not stumble into an intimacy with you 
because he is absent-minded, or because 
he is liable to an attack of affectation. 
He is as conscious as Poussin's giants, 
whom he once described as "seated on 
the tops of craggy mountains, playing 
idly on their Pan's pipes, and knowing 
the beginning and the end of their own 
story." Many sentences of his, from their 
structure, might be attributed to Cole- 
ridge, the single person from whom Haz- 
litt admits to have learned anything;* 

* If Hazlitt conve)'^ed some of his best mannerisms 
from Coleridge, not always transmuting them, surely the 



28l 



but there is no mistaking his note Smue : 
that is as obvious as the syncopations in 
a Scotch tune, or the long eyes of Or- 
cagna's saints. 

He wishes you to know, at every 
breathing-space, " how ill's all here about 
my heart ; but 'tis no matter." Laying 
by or taking up an old print or folio, he 
loosens some fond confidence to that 
surprised novice, the common reader. 
Like Shelley here, as in a few other af- 
fectionate absurdities, the prince of prose, 
turning from his proper affairs, assures 
you that he, too, is human, hoping, un- 
happy ; he also has lived in Arcadia. It 
is in such irrelevancies that he is fully 
himself, Hazlitt freed, Hazlitt autobio- 

balance may be said to be even when one discovers later 
in Hartley Coleridge such an easy inherited use of Haz- 
Htt's "flail of gold " as is exemplified in this summary of 
Roger Ascham's career. "There was a primitive hon- 
esty, a kindly innocence about this good old scholar, 
which gave a personal interest to the homeliest details of 
his life. He had the rare felicity of passing through the 
worst of times without persecution and without dishonor. 
He lived with princes and princesses, prelates and diplo- 
matists, without offence as without ambition. Though he 
enjoyed the smiles of royalty, his heart was none the 
worse, and his fortunes little the better." 



282 



graphic, " his chariot-wheels hot by driv- 
ing fast."* Who can forget the paren- 
theses in his advices to his Httle son, 
about the scholar having neither mate 
nor fellow, and the god of love clapping 
his wings upon the river-bank to mock 
him as he passes by ? Or the noble and 
moving passage in The Pleasures of 
Painting, beginning with " My father was 
willing to sit as long as I pleased," and 
ending with the longing for the revolu- 
tion of the great Platonic year, that those 
times might come over again ! He fresh- 
ens with his own childhood the garden 
of larkspur and mignonette at Walworth, 
and *' the rich notes of the thrush that 
startle the ear of winter . . . dear in them- 
selves, and dearer for the sake of what is 
departed." You care not so much for 
the placid stream by Peterborough as for 
his own wistful pilgrimage to the nigh 



* The quotation is from Coleridge, and it was applied 
by him to Dryden. Hazlitt himself unconsciously ex- 
panded and spoiled it in his essay on Burke. "The 
wheels of his imagination did not catch fire from the rot- 
tenness of the material, but from the rapidity of their 
motion." 



2S'J 



farmhouse gate, where the ten -year-old 
Grace Loftus (his much-beloved mother, 
who survived him) used to gaze upon the 
setting sun. And in a choric outburst 
of praise for Mrs. Siddons, the splendor 
seems to culminate less in ** her majestic 
form rising up against misfortune, an 
antagonist power to it " (what a truly 
Shakespearean breadth is in that de- 
scription !) ; less in the sight of her name 
on the play-bill, " drawing after it a long 
trail of Eastern glory, a joy and felicity 
unutterable," than in the widening dream 
of the happy lad in the pit, in his sover- 
eign vision *' of waning time, of Persian 
thrones and them that sat on them"; in 
the human life which appeared to him, 
of a sudden, " far from indifferent," and 
in his ** overwhelming and drowning flood 
of tears." He can beautify the evening 
star itself, this innovator, who records 
that after a tranced and busy day at the 
easel, the day of Austerlitz, he watched 
it set over a poor man's cottage with 
other thoughts and feelings than he shall 
ever have again. There is nothing of 
/e 77101 haissable in all this. It is delib- 



284 



erate naturalism ; the rebellion against 
didactics and ''tall talk," the milestone 
of a return, parallel with that of Words- 
worth, to the fearless contemplation of 
plain and near things. But in a profess- 
ing logician, is it not somewhat peculiar? 
When has even a poet so centred the 
universe in his own heart, without of- 
fence ? 

Hazlitt threw away his brush, as a 
heroic measure, because he foresaw but 
a middling success. Many canvases he 
cut into shreds, in a fury of dissatisfac- 
tion with himself. Northcote, however, 
thought his lack of patience had spoiled 
a great painter. He was too full of wor- 
ship of the masters to make an attentive 
artisan. The sacrifice, like all his sacri- 
fices, great or small, left nothing behind 
but sweetness, the unclouded love of ex- 
cellence, and the capacity of rejoicing 
at another's attaining whatev^er he had 
missed. But the sense of disparity be- 
tween supreme intellectual achievement 
and that which is only partial and rela- 
tive, albeit of equal purity, followed him 
like a frenzy. Comparison is yet more 



285 



difficult in literature than in art, and Haz- 
litt could take some satisfaction in the 
results of his second ard«r. He felt his 
power most, perhaps, as a critic of the 
theatre. English actors owe him an in- 
calculable debt, and their best spirits are 
not unmindful of it. He was reasonably 
assured of the duration and increase of 
his fame. Has he not, in one of his head- 
strong digressions, called the thoughts 
in his Table -Talk "founded as rock, 
free as air, the tone like an Italian pict- 
ure?" Even there, however, the faint- 
heartedness natural to every true artist 
troubled him. He went home in despair 
from the spectacle of the Indian juggler, 
" in his white dress and tightened tur- 
ban," tossing the four brass balls. ** To 
make them revolve round him at certain 
intervals, like the planets in their spheres, 
to make them chase one another like 
sparkles of fire, or shoot up like flowers 
or meteors, to throw them behind his 
back, and twine them round his neck 
like ribbons or like serpents ; to do what 
appears an impossibility, and to do it 
with all the ease, the grace, the careless- 



s86 



ness imaginable ; to laugh at, to play 
with the glittering mockeries, to follow 
them with his e^e as if he could fascinate 
them with its lambent fire, or as if he had 
only to see that they kept time to the 
music on the stage — there is something 
in all this which he who does not admire 
may be quite sure he never really ad- 
mired anything in the whole course of 
his life. It is skill surmounting difficulty, 
and beauty triumphing over skill. ... It 
makes me ashamed of myself. I ask 
what there is that I can do as well as 
this? Nothing." A third person must 
give another answer. The w^hole passage 
offers a very exquisite parallel ; for in 
just such a daring, varied, and magical 
way can William Hazlitt write. The as- 
tounding result, "which costs nothing," 
is founded, in each case, upon the toil of 
a lifetime. Hazlitt's style is an incredi- 
ble thing. It is not, like Lamb's, of one 
warp and woof. It soars to the rhetori- 
cal sublime, and drops to hard Saxon 
slang. It is for all the world, and not 
only for specialists. Its range and change 
incorporate the utmost of many men. 



287 



The trenchant sweep, the simplicity and 
point of Newman at his best, are 
matched by the pages on Cobbett, on 
Fox, and Oil the Regal Character ; and 
there is, to choose but one opposite 
instance, in the paper On the Uncofi- 
scious7iess of Genius, touching Correg- 
gio, a fragment of pure eloquence of a 
very ornate sort, whose onward bound, 
glow, and volley can give Mr. Swinburne's 
Essays and Studies a look as of sails wait- 
ing for the wind. The same hand which 
fills a brief with epic cadences and invo- 
cations overwrought, throws down, often 
without an adjective, sentence after sen- 
tence of ringing steel : " Fashion is gen- 
tility running away from vulgarity, and 
afraid of being overtaken by it." " It is not 
the omission of individual circumstance, 
but the omission of general truth, which 
constitutes the little, the deformed, and 
the short-lived in art." The man's large 
voice in these aphorisms is Hazlitt's un- 
mistakably. If it be not as novel to this 
generation as if he were but just enter- 
ing the lists of authorship, it is because 
his fecundating mind has been long en- 



288 



riching at second-hand the libraries of 
the English world. He comes forth, like 
another outrider, Rossetti, so far behind 
his heralds and disciples, that his man- 
nered utterance seems familiar, and an 
echo of theirs. For it may be said at 
last, thanks to the numerous reprints of 
the last seven years, and thanks to a few- 
competent critics, whom Mr. Stevenson 
leads, that Hazlitt's robust work is in a 
fair way to be known and appraised, by a 
public which is a little less unworthy of 
him than his own. His method is en- 
tirely unscientific, and therefore archaic. 
If we can profit no longer by him, we can 
get out of him cheer and delight : and 
these profit unto immortality. Mean- 
while, what mere " maker of beautiful 
English" shall be pitted against him 
there where he sits, the despair of a gen- 
eration of experts, continually tossing the 
four brass balls ? 

It has been said often by shallow re- 
viewers, and is said sometimes still, that 
Hazlitt's style aims at effect ; as if an 
effect must not be won, w^ithout aiming, 
by a "born man of letters," as Mr. Saints- 



289 



bury described him, "who could not 
help turning into literature everything 
he touched." * The " effect," under given 
conditions, is manifest, unavoidable. Once 
let Hazlitt speak, as he speaks ever, in the 
warmth of conviction, and what an intoxi- 
cating music begins ! — wild as that of the 
gypsies, and with the same magnet-touch 
on the sober senses : enough to subvert 
all "criticism and idle distinction," and 
to bring back those Theban times when 
the force of a sound, rather than masons 
and surveyors, sent the very walls waltx- 
ing into their places. 

In the face of diction so joyously clear 
as his, so sumptuous and splendid, it 
is well to endorse Mr. Ruskin, that 
" no right style was ever founded save 
out of a sincere heart." It can never 
be said of William Hazlitt, as Dean 

♦ The Rev. H. R. Haweis has another characterization 
of these breathing and burning pages : " long and tiresome 
essays by Hazlitt." So they are, sure enough, if only 
you be endowed to think so ! Hazlitt himself gives the 
diverting fact for what it is worth, that " three chimney- 
sweep% meeting three Chinese in Lincoln's Inn Fields, 
they laughed at one another till they were ready to drop 
down." 

19 



290 



Trench well said of those other "great 
stylists," Landor and De Quincey, that 
he had a lack of moral earnestness. 
What he was determined to impress 
upon his reader, during the quarter- 
century while he held a pen, was not 
that he was knowing, not that he w^as 
worthy of the renown and fortune which 
passed him by, but only that he had rec- 
titude and a consuming passion for good. 
He declares aloud that his escutcheon 
has no bar-sinister : he has not sold him- 
self ; he has spoken truth in and out of 
season ; he has honored the excellent at 
his own risk and cost ; he has fought for 
a principle and been slain for it, from his 
youth up. His sole boast is proven. In 
a far deeper sense than Leigh Hunt, for 
whom he forged the lovely compliment, 
he was "the visionary in humanity, the 
fool of virtue," and the captain of those 
who stood fast, in a hostile day, for ig- 
nored and eternal ideals. The best thing 
to be said of him, the thing for which, 
in Haydon's phrase, "everybody must 
love him," is that he himself loved jus- 
tice and hated iniquity. He shared the 



291 



groaning of the spirit after mortal wel- 
fare with Swift and Fielding, with Shel- 
ley and Matthew Arnold, with Carlyle 
and Ruskin ; he was corroded with cares 
and desires not his own. Beside this 
intense devotedness, what personal flaw 
will ultimately show? The host who 
figure in the Roman martyrology hang 
all their claim upon the fact of mar- 
tyrdom, and, according to canon law, 
need not have been saints in their life- 
time at all. So with such souls as his : 
in the teeth of a thousand acknowl- 
edged imperfections in life or in art, 
they remain our exemplars. Let them 
do what they will, at some one stroke 
they dignify this earth. It is not Haz- 
litt, '* the born man of letters " alone, 
but Hazlitt the born humanist, who be- 
queaths us, from his England of coarse 
misconception and abuse, a memory like 
a loadstar, and a name which is a toast 
to be drunk standing. 



THE END 



MONSIEUR HENRI 

A Foot-note to French History. By Louise 
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